The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars were the direct result of China's isolationalist and exclusionary trade policy with the West. Confucian China's attempts to exclude pernicious foreign ideas resulted in highly restricted trade. Prior to the 1830s, there was but one port open to Western merchants, Guangzhou (Canton) and but one commodity that the Chinese would accept in trade, silver. British and American merchants, anxious to address what they perceived as a trade imbalance, determined to import the one product that the Chinese did not themselves have but which an ever-increasing number of them wanted: opium. Before 1828, large quantities of the Spanish silver coin, the Carolus, flowed into China in payment for the exotic commodities that Europeans craved; in contrast, in the decade of the 1830s, despite an imperial decree outlawing the export of yellow gold and white silver, "only $7,303,841 worth of silver was imported, whereas the silver exported was estimated at $26,618, 815 in the foreign silver coin, $25,548,205 in sycee, and $3,616,996 in gold" (Kuo, p. 51). although the Chinese imperial governed had long prohibited the drug except for medicinal use, the "British Hong" (companies such as Dent, Jardine, and Matheson authorized to operate in Canton) bought cheaply produced opium in the Begal and Malwa (princely) districts under the auspices of the British East India Company, the number 150 lb. chests of the narcotic being imported rising from 9,708 in 1820 to 35,445 in 1835. With the British government's 1833 cancellation of the trade monopoly enjoyed by the East India Company, cheap opium flooded the market, and China's net outflow of silver amounted to some 34 million Mexican silver dollars over the course of the 1830s.
As the habit of smoking opium spread from the idle rich to ninety per cent of all Chinese males under the age of forty in the country's coastal regions, business activity was much reduced, the civil service ground to a halt, and the standard of living fell. The Emperor Dao guang's special anti-opium commissioner Lin Ze-xu (1785-1850), modestly estimated the number of his countrymen addicted to the drug to be 4 million, but a British physician practising in Canton set the figure at 12 million. Equally disturbing for the imperial government was the imbalance of trade with the West: whereas prior to 1810 Western nations had been spending 350 million Mexican silver dollars on porcelain, cotton, silks, brocades, and various grades of tea, by 1837 opium represented 57 per cent of Chinese imports, and for fiscal 1835-36 alone China exported 4.5 million silver dollars. The official sent in 1838 by the Emperor Dao guang (1821-1850) of the Qing Dynasty to confiscate and destroy all imports of opium, Lin Ze-xu, calculated that in fiscal 1839 Chinese opium smokers consumed 100 million taels' worth of the drug while the entire spending by the imperial government that year spent 40 million taels. He reportedly concluded, "If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army" quoted by Chesneaux et al., p. 55). By the late 1830s, foreign merchant vessels, notably those of Britain and the United States, were landing over 30,000 chests annually. Meantime, corrupt officials in the hoppo (customs office) and ruthless merchants in the port cities were accumulating wealth beyond "all the tea in China" by defying imperial interdictions that had existed in principle since 1796. The standard rate for an official's turning a blind eye to the importation of a single crate of opium was 80 taels. Between 1821 and 1837 the illegal importation of opium (theoretically a capital offence) increased five fold. A hotbed of vice, bribery, and disloyalty to the Emperor's authority, the opium port of Canton would be the flashpoint for the inevitable clash between the governments of China and Great Britain.
British merchants were frustrated by Chinese trade laws and refused to cooperate with Chinese legal officials because of their routine use of torture. Upon his arrival in Canton in March, 1839, the Emperor's special emissary, Lin Ze-xu, took swift action against the foreign merchants and their Chinese accomplices, making some 1,600 arrests and confiscating 11,000 pounds of opium. Despite attempts by the British superintendent of trade, Charles Elliot, to negotiate a compromise, in June Lin ordered the seizure another 20,00 crates of opium from foreign-controlled factories, holding all foreign merchants under arrest until they surrendered nine million dollars worth of opium, which he then had burned publicly. Finally, he ordered the port of Canton closed to all foreign merchants. Elliot in turn ordered a blockade of the Pearl River. In an ensuing naval battle, described as a victory by Chinese propagandists, in November 1839 the Royal Navy sank a number of Chinese vessels near Guangzhou. By January 1841, the British had captured the Bogue forts at the Pearl's mouth and controlled the high ground above the port of Canton. Subsequently, British forces scored victories on land at Ningbo and Chinhai, crushing the ill-equipped and poorly trained imperial forces with ease. Viewed as too moderate back at home, in August 1841 Elliot was replaced by Sir Henry Pottinger to launch a major offensive against Ningbo and Tiajin. By the end of June British forces occupied Zhenjiang and controlled the vast rice-growing lands of southern China.
The Second Opium War
The outbreak of fresh hostilities under such circumstances was almost inevitable because Chinese officials were extremely reluctant to enact the terms of the treaties of 1842-44. Since the French and Americans had extracted additional concessions since the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, including clauses about renegotiation after twelve years, Great Britain insisted upon exercising its "most-favoured nation status" in 1854. This time, the British demanded that China open all her ports to foreign trade, legalise the importation of opium from British possessions in India and Burma, exempt British goods from all import duties, and permit the establishment of a full embassy in Peking. For two years Qing court officials stalled, trying to buy time. However, events ran out of their control when on 8 October 1856 officials boarded the Chinese-registered but Hong Kong-based merchant vessel Arrow, which they suspected of involvement in both smuggling and piracy. The British trade officials naturally argued that as a foreign vessel the Arrow's activities did not fall under Chinese legal jurisdiction, and that therefore the sailors who had been arrested should be released under the extraterritoriality clause of the Treaty of Nanking.
Having dealt with the temporary distraction of the Sepoy Mutiny in India, in 1857 Great Britain dispatched forces to Canton in a coordinated operation with American warships. France, seething over the recent Chinese execution of a missionary, Father August Chapdelaine, joined Russia, the U. S. A., and Great Britain against China. However, a joint Anglo-French force, without other military assistance, under the command of Admiral Sir Michael Seymour, Lord Elgin, and Marshall Gros seized Canton late in 1857 after valiant but futile resistance by the city's citizens and Chinese soldiers. In May 1858, the Anglo-French naval taskforce captured the Taku forts near Tiensin (Tianjin), effectively ending hostilities. France, Russia, the United States, and Great Britain then forced China to agree to open eleven more major ports to Western trade under the terms of the Treaty of Tientsin (June 1858). When the Chinese once again proved slow to enact the terms of the treaty, Britain order Admiral Sir James Hope to shell the Chinese forts at the mouth of the Peiho River in 1859. The Chinese capitulated, permitting all foreigners with passports to travel freely in China, and granting Chinese who converted to Christianity full property rights.
Since Chinese officials once again refused to enact a treaty provision, namely the establishment of Western embassies in Peking, an Anglo-French force launched a fresh offensive from Hong Kong in 1860, ultimately destroying the Emperor Xianfeng's Summer Palace in Chengde, and the Summer Palace and the Old Summer Palace in Peking amidst wide-spread looting by both troops and civilians.
Under the terms of the Convention of Peking, signed by Prince Gong, brother of the Emperor Xianfeng, on 18 October 1860, the ports of Hankou, Niuzhuang, Danshui, and Nanjing were opened to foreign vessels, as were the waters of the Yangtze, and foreign missionaries were free to proselytize. China had to pay further reparations, this time ten million taels, to each of France and Britain, and another two million taels to British merchants for destruction of property. Finally, China ceded the port of Kowloon to Great Britain, and agreed to permit the export of indentured Chinese labourers to the Americas. Arguably, without such a massive injection of cheap labour the transcontinental railways of the United States and Canada would not have been completed so quickly and economically. On the other hand, China's humiliation led directly to the fall of the Manchu Dynasty and the social upheavals that precipitated the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
What had begun as a conflict of interests between English desire for profits from the trade in silk, porcelain, and tea and the Confucian ideal of self-sufficiency and exclusion of corrupting influences resulted in the partitioning of China by the Western powers (including the ceding of Hong Kong to Great Britain), humiliating defeats on land and sea by technologically and logistically superior Western forces, and the traditional values of an entire culture undermined by Christian missionaries and rampant trading in Turkish and Indian opium. No wonder the Boxer rebels' chief goal was to purify and reinvigorate their nation by the utter annihilation of all "foreign devils."
Chapter III Part 1: Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime
Introduction
Drug trafficking is the most widespread and lucrative organized crime operation in the United States, accounting for nearly 40 percent of this country's organized crime activity and generating an annual income estimated to be as high as $110 billion. Large trafficking organizations dominate the illicit drug market. These groups include the "families" of America's La Cosa Nostra, as well as an array of more recently identified crime groups such as the Sicilian "Mafia," outlaw motorcycle gangs and groups based in the Nigerian and Colombian communities. While La Cosa Nostra has historically been involved in narcotics trafficking, newer organizations, in many ways quite different from La Cosa Nostra, now play a major role in the drug trade. Generally, these newer groups develop solely around drug trafficking operations and are activity-specific, dependent only on drug-related criminal activity for income. They tend to be more fluidly organized than La Cosa Nostra, and are not as self-contained but are marked by a degree of violence and corruption unsurpassed by any other criminal activity.
Organized crime groups involved in drug trafficking, however, share a central feature with other organized crime groups in that they consist of a core criminal group and a specialized criminal support designed to facilitate illicit activity. This "core/support" configuration is one this Commission has found to be common to all organized crime groups today.
Cocaine Trafficking
America's cocaine supply at present originates exclusively in South America. Coca is cultivated principally in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador, and conversion laboratories have been located in Colombia, Brazil and Venezuela. Other South American and Caribbean countries serve as transshipment sites. All phases of the cocaine trade, including cultivation, processing and distribution have expanded since 1984, and the industry shows no signs of diminishing despite the fact that cocaine supply already exceeds consumer demand.
Control of the cocaine industry has traditionally been maintained by a cartel of Colombian traffickers. Colombian groups are the largest, wealthiest, most sophisticated organizations trafficking in cocaine. A key to their domination of the market has been their control of the processing laboratories used to convert coca grown traditionally in Bolivia and Peru. Export of the drug to the United States has also been handled almost exclusively by Colombian trafficking organizations. While Colombians currently control an estimated 75 percent of the cocaine distributed to the United States, their domination has been lessened recently both by the Colombian government's imposition of severe restrictions on the importation of chemicals essential to cocaine processing and by the destruction of cocaine processing sites throughout Colombia by government authorities. In 1984 three major Colombian conversion laboratories were discovered and destroyed: at Tranquilandia, the largest facility, ten metric tons of cocaine and 10,000 barrels of processing chemicals were seized. In total, Colombian authorities confiscated 16 metric tons of cocaine in 1984, a 600 percent increase from the 2.5 metric tons seized in the previous year. The pressures on cocaine traffickers were compounded in that year by the Colombian government's decision to extradite drug traffickers to the United States, and by the subsequent issuance of warrants for the arrest of several major traffickers.
Intensified Colombian law enforcement measures have had significant impact on trafficking operations. The initiatives have prompted many traffickers to seek refuge in other South American countries, and in some cases to relocate their processing laboratories. These incidents have resulted in a geographic dispersal of cocaine processing and export activities, most notably to Bolivia and Peru. While it appeared initially that activity in these countries was sponsored and overseen by Colombian traffickers, increasing evidence suggests that groups in both countries are becoming self-sufficient. Such developments, however, remain an exception to the prevailing Colombian dominance.
Despite the spread of cocaine activity through South America, Colombian groups have left little room in the cocaine trade for small-scale smugglers. While some independent operators and smaller smuggling groups occasionally work independently of the Colombian cartel, most are tied to the larger organization in at least a contractor relationship.
The Colombian Connection: Origins
The Colombian involvement in U.S. cocaine trafficking can be traced to the influx of Cuban citizens to South Florida after the Castro Revolution in the early 1960's. Some of the Cuban-settled communities became bases for the continuation of established Cuban organized crime networks known as the "Cuban Mafia." The Cuban Mafia had been a major distributor of the cocaine in Cuba, where the drug has long been accepted as a social luxury, and thus had existing connections with South American cocaine trafficking organizations. At first, the Florida Cuban Mafia factions imported only enough cocaine to satisfy members of their own community, but by the mid-1960's, they began to import greater quantities of the drug in an effort to expand distribution and increase profit. By 1965 Colombians supplied nearly 100 percent of the cocaine moving through the Cuban networks. Colombians refined the drug and Cubans trafficked and distributed it in the United States. The system worked for a time, but the Colombians increasingly desired control of the entire operation. Through the late 1960's and early 1970's they became more involved in cocaine production, and increased their trafficking role. By 1978 Colombian traffickers had cut all ties with the Cubans and assumed the dominant role they now play in supplying cocaine to the American market.
Colombian groups have continued to control the U.S. cocaine market through the 1980's for a number of reasons. Geographically, Colombia is well-positioned both to receive coca from Peru and Bolivia and to export the processed drug to the United States either by air or by sea. In addition, the country's vast central forests effectively conceal clandestine processing laboratories and air strips, which facilitate the traffic. Perhaps most importantly, the Colombians have a momentum by benefit of their early involvement in the cocaine trade. They have evolved from small, disassociated groups into compartmentalized organizations and are sophisticated and systematized in their approach to trafficking cocaine in the United States. Further, groups in the Colombian population in the U.S. provide traffickers access to this country and often serves as a distribution network for Colombian cocaine.
The Colombian Organization
The major Colombian trafficking organizations are structured to control each intermediate step required in processing and exporting cocaine. Like traditional organized crime groups, they are built of interdependent and essential component "divisions," each with a specialized area of responsibility. Different members act as laborers, processors, transporters, financiers and enforcers. In addition, organizations generally supplement their regular membership with criminal support of affiliates who perform services on a fee basis. Few members of any organizational division are aware of the others involved in the enterprise, and trafficking bosses are well-insulated and protected by their organizations.
Organization laborers and processors prepare cocaine for U.S. consumption. Most laborers in the cultivation phase are Peruvian or Bolivian peasants who cultivate and harvest coca in remote areas of the Eastern Andes, then process the coca leaves to base in nearby villages. The growers are allied in small, independent groups, but are typically financed, overseen, and protected by members of a larger Colombian organization.
Processed coca base is usually flown on light aircraft from the mountain villages to Colombian processing facilities by those members of the Colombian organization responsible for transportation. The planes land at clandestine airstrips, often simple mud runways, located near the processing laboratories. The laboratories vary widely in size, ranging from crude small-quantity operations to large, sophisticated complexes, and can be found both in Colombia's jungle and urban areas.
Coca base is typically processed to cocaine hydrochloride in the laboratories, then bagged and taped into kilogram packages, which are sometimes coded to indicate a particular United States destination. The packages are loaded into duffle bags or burlap sacks, then moved by the transportation group to a "stash house," a storage facility usually located near a seaport or a clandestine airstrip. The cocaine is held at the stash house until it is exported from Colombia.
Colombian trafficking organizations currently export an estimated 62 percent of the cocaine they process on private aircraft. The remaining 38 percent is shipped on ocean vessels or smuggled on commercial air carriers. Most shipments are smuggled out of Colombia from the country's northern coastal region, the Guajira peninsula. Principal smuggling centers include the cities of Santa Marta, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Medellin. In addition, a significant percentage of processed cocaine leaves Colombia from airstrips located near larger processing facilities in the jungles.
Typically, Colombian organizations oversee each cocaine shipment from cultivation through wholesale transactions in the United States. Retail and street-level sales are handled by a variety of smaller groups and individuals in this country.
The money generated by the wholesale cocaine transaction is maintained for the organization by financial experts familiar with international banking, who are responsible for laundering, banking and investing drug profits, and for assuring that a portion of the drug profit is returned to Colombia for reinvestment in the organization's cocaine enterprise. The cartel's own financial experts are supported by a complement of bankers, lawyers and other professionals in the United States, who play a crucial role in facilitating these transactions.
Colombian trafficking organizations, like other organized crime groups, rely on "enforcement" through violence and intimidation to protect their inventory and profits. "Enforcement" occurs both in Colombia and in the United States and includes the collection of debts owed to the organization and the elimination of interference from competitors, informants and law enforcement officials.
Pilots: The American Affiliates
Cocaine is ordinarily smuggled from South America to the United States for major trafficking organizations by American citizens acting as mercenary pilots. Recruits include ex-military, commercial and private pilots, and in some cases, unlicensed aviators. The speed, mobility and evasive capabilities of air transport have made it the preferred node of shipment among Colombian traffickers, and many have built airstrips either near their processing centers or along the coastlines to permit the fast direct export of cocaine. On Colombia's north coast alone, over 150 clandestine landing strips and three international airports facilitate smuggling activities.
Individual pilots are generally responsible for purchasing or leasing transportation vehicles and hiring flight crews. Obtaining a plane for purchase seldom presents any difficulty, since many aircraft are regularly advertised for sale in a number of trade periodicals. One popular journal, Trade-a-Plane, is published three times each month and advertises thousands of aircraft available for sale in each issue. Planes are also available for purchase at numerous government auctions of seized properties. These events often allow traffickers to repurchase aircraft, which they were previously forced to forfeit.
Because traffickers attempt to ship the largest possible quantities of cocaine to the widest range of destinations in the United States, the aircraft selected for smuggling generally represent the optimum balance between range and cargo capacity. The most popular of these are conventional light twin engine planes, such as the Piper Aztec, Piper Navajo and the Cessna 400 series. Most such planes can transport about a ton of cocaine over a range of about 1,800 miles and can stay airborne for 11 and one hours with standard fuel systems. Larger airplanes such as DC-3 aircraft are common on shuttle flights between the United States and various transshipment points; the fastest aircraft are always preferred when available.
To maximize range and capability, smuggling planes are often outfitted with auxiliary fuel systems. These auxiliary systems may be attached to the outside body of the aircraft or the wing, but must be inspected and approved by the Federal Aviation Administration each time the outfitted aircraft prepares for flight. A favored auxiliary system for cocaine traffickers is the collapsible rubber fuel "bladder," which may be placed in the plane's fuselage, and simply folded up or thrown away after the fuel contained within is used. The space occupied by the bladder on the trip to Colombia can be utilized for cocaine transport on the return journey. Bladders are, under all circumstances, prohibited by Federal law.
Although the legitimate need for auxiliary fuel systems is very limited, the systems are well-advertised and readily available. One trafficker told the Commission he purchased bladders and other long-range fuel systems regularly, always paying the seller with "suitcases full of cash." He claims his cash was never questioned or refused.
Traffic From Colombia to the United States: The Hydra's Head
Smugglers use a vast number of both air and sea trafficking routes to transport cocaine from South America to the United States. The most commonly travelled routes are through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, through the Yucatan Channel between Mexico and Cuba, and through the Mona Passage, bordered by the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Traditionally, 90 percent of the cocaine shipped by these routes has entered the United States at points along the Florida coast; traffickers now, however, more frequently deliver shipments to all the States along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere throughout this country. Cocaine traffic also now runs directly from Colombia's west coast to California and other western states. These shifts are perceived as a response by traffickers to increased law enforcement pressure in South Florida, specifically to the intensified efforts of the South Florida/Caribbean Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. The theme is a common one: as law enforcement closes off one point of entry to drug traffickers, traffickers develop many new points of entry as replacements.
Air Shipment
Nearly two-thirds of the cocaine exported from South America to the United State is transported by general aviation aircraft. Planes of all sizes, ranging from small turbo-prop craft to large C-123 cargo transport planes, are used for drug shipment. Small aircraft, which cannot carry adequate fuel to allow direct flight from Colombia to the United States, must refuel at transshipment points between the two countries. These contact points are indispensable, and are located throughout Central America, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. Transshipment points may be simply refueling stations, or may be bases or stations equipped to allow cocaine off-loading and repackaging. From the transshipment points, cocaine is generally ferried to the United States by small planes or boats.
Mexico has gained popularity as a transshipment point since 1980. Although coca cultivation has not been observed in Mexico, an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the cocaine exported to the United States currently transits that country. Three Mexican transshipment patterns are typical. First, Mexican traffickers obtain cocaine in South America, transport it to Mexico, then traffic the drug overland into the United States. Second, Colombian or American couriers travel by commercial aircraft from South America to Mexico, then cross the border into this country. Finally, Colombian or North American traffickers use Mexico's numerous clandestine airstrips, especially in Yucatan, for refueling and for loading purposes; the smuggling plane in use may continue directly into the United States, or the shipment may be broken into smaller loads, then trafficked overland by Mexican organizations. The majority of cocaine shipped through Mexico is transported to the United States by car, truck or bus, but a significant amount is smuggled aboard small aircraft. The Mexican groups, formerly limited primarily to trafficking heroin and marijuana, have eagerly expanded their role as middlemen between Colombian traffickers and American consumers.
Maritime Shipment
An estimated 18 percent (15 tons in 1984) of the cocaine trafficked into the United States is exported from South America by sea vessel. All types of ships are used for smuggling, from small high-speed cigarette boats to large commercial cargo carriers. Colombians dominate maritime cocaine smuggling, and most shipments depart that country's north coastline, which features three major seaports and countless debarkation ports for smaller craft. Approximately one-half of the cocaine exported by sea is concealed in commercial vessels, and a smaller percentage is shipped in private boats which are frequently outfitted with special compartments designed for drug storage. Small amounts of cocaine are also often shipped on with marijuana on non-commercial smuggling vessels.
Maritime trafficking routes have shifted significantly in the past five years, primarily in response to increased law enforcement surveillance. While a major portion of the maritime traffic formerly flowed directly into South Florida, traffickers now increasingly use the longer eastern routes through the Caribbean to the Mid-Atlantic and New England coasts, as well as direct routes to the U.S. west coast. These routes make smuggling more expensive for traffickers, since they require larger vessels, larger crews and more sophisticated electronic equipment.
Case Study: Devoe Airlines
Devoe Airlines was a scheduled commuter air service operating between Miami and smaller Florida cities during the early 1980's. Owned by Miami pilot Jack Devoe, the business was essentially a front for a Colombian drug trafficking operation, which included regular large quantity marijuana and cocaine smuggling. In total, 8 to 10 contract pilots employed by Devoe were involved in over 100 trafficking flights over a five year period and carried roughly 7,000 pounds of cocaine from South America to the United States. Jack Devoe estimates that his flying organization grossed millions of dollars each month during peak smuggling periods.
Devoe's trafficking pilots initially travelled non-stop routes between the United States and Colombia, but developed a transshipment point on Little Derby Island in the Bahamas for purposes of "security . . . [and] police protection" in the 1980's. Devoe hired six to eight employees to work as needed at the island base to unload and repackage drug shipments. There was no interference from Bahamian law enforcement at the Little Darby base "as long as the payments [to officials] were on time."
Typically operating mid-size turbo-prop aircraft, Devoe pilots departed for Colombia either from the base at Little Derby Island or from Florida airports. Their route took them through the Windward Passage generally to Colombian locations about 60 miles south of the equator. In the early stages of the operation, landings were made at official Colombian airports including the airfields at Santa Marta and Riohacha. In at least one instance, cocaine was openly loaded onto the smuggling aircraft at Riohacha airport. In the early 1980's Devoe shifted landings to clandestine jungle airstrips maintained by the organization's cocaine supplier, Pepe Cabrera. This system streamlined the trafficking process by eliminating transport of the cocaine to an airport. The cocaine shipment was loaded directly onto the aircraft near the strip, where the plane was simultaneously prepared for the return flight.
Generally, Devoe pilots returned to the United States within one day. Their preferred return route extended along the Colombia/Venezuela border, over Haiti, and to the Bahamian base on Little Derby Island. There, cocaine was sealed into the wing fuel tanks of a small aircraft and flown directly into South Florida for delivery to the cartel's representative there.
The Devoe organization's methods for avoiding interdiction between South America and the United States were relatively simple and typical of such smuggling operations. A Devoe pilot learned the frequencies of DEA surveillance aircraft on one occasion by "acting like a helicopter buff" inspecting a DEA Cobra pursuit helicopter parked near the Devoe hangar. Inside the helicopter the pilot copied the frequencies from a clipboard hanging on the instrument panel. As the pilot explained to the Commission:
By [subsequently] using our scanner and our knowledge of the frequencies in use, we could monitor the activities of DEA planes . . . we could learn not only the activities of the planes, but also go up and check the plane out. By learning what types of aircraft DEA was using we could plan our own strategy more effectively . . .
Devoe also regularly sent "cover-flight" aircraft ahead of the smuggling planes along the trafficking route to monitor DEA and Customs Service surveillance patrols by radio. These planes, which carried no drug cargo, were also used to decoy pursuit aircraft. Once in the United States, Devoe strategy for clearing Customs inspection was to:
". . . act normally and file a flight plan, come in and land, and let them inspect the airplane . . . Customs inspectors were far less interested in a lengthy examination of my plane if I came in on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of the televised football game. If the Dolphins were playing, that was even better."
Using these tactics, Devoe Airlines was able to complete over 100 trafficking flights from Colombia without interference from law enforcement authorities.
Case Study: Barry Seal
Adler Berriman Seal, a former TWA 747 captain, flew cocaine from Colombia to the United States for over seven years during the late 1970's and early 1980's. Seal was recruited as a trafficking pilot by a personal friend who worked for the Colombian cocaine trafficking organization headed by Jorge Ochoa, and eventually worked directly with that organization's leadership.
Initially, Seal flew direct trafficking flights between Louisiana, and Colombia. He piloted a number of different smuggling aircraft, the largest of which was a Vietnam-vintage C-123 capable of holding tons of packaged cocaine. Seal always departed and returned to his Louisiana base at night to reduce chances of interdiction. His typical route took him over the Yucatan Peninsula (not over the more heavily patrolled Yucatan channel) and directly over Central America to the eastern tip of Honduras, then south to any one of a number of airstrips and airports in north central Colombia.
According to Seal, the Ochoa organization paid Colombian officials bribes of $10,000 to $25,000, per flight for a "window," i.e., a specific time, position and altitude designated for the smuggling flight's penetration of the Colombian air space. If this payment was not made, the aircraft was susceptible to interception by Colombian authorities. Seal generally arrived in Colombia at dawn. His aircraft was loaded with cocaine and refueled within an hour, sometimes within fifteen minutes; and he returned immediately to the United States.
Seal used two fairly simple techniques to avoid interdiction on his return trip to the United States: both were effective because of the heavy helicopter traffic running between the Gulf Coast States and the hundreds of oil rigs located off shore. First, when he reached the middle of the Gulf on his return trip, Seal slowed his aircraft to 110-120 knots and was thus perceived by monitoring radar as a helicopter, not a plane. Secondly, at a distance of about 50 miles off the United States coast, he dropped the aircraft to an altitude of 500-1000 feet in order to co-mingle with the helicopter traffic, and thereby arouse even less suspicion.
Once in United States airspace, Seal proceeded to prearranged points 40 to 50 miles inland. The points were mapped out in advance with Loran C, a long-range navigational instrument. Further inland, he was generally joined by a helicopter. The two aircraft proceeded to a drop zone, where the helicopter hovered close to the ground. Seal then dropped the load of cocaine from the airplane on a parachute; the helicopter picked up the load from the drop zone and delivered it to waiting automobiles, which eventually moved the cocaine to Miami. Seal proceeded to land his drug-free aircraft at any nearby airport.
Seal was well paid for his services. He claims his top fee for smuggling a kilogram of cocaine was $5,000; an average load was 300 kilograms. His most profitable single load netted him $1.5 million. He was never apprehended in connection with this operation.
Specialized Electronics: The Smuggler's Edge
Like many trafficking pilots today, both Seal and Devoe relied on sophisticated electronic equipment to maintain and secure communications within their organization and to monitor law enforcement surveillance efforts. Most devices used, while expensive, are readily available in the United States, and trafficking organizations, of course, fund the purchase of any equipment that will facilitate their operations. Seal, for example, once spent over $200,000 cash on communication and surveillance equipment for the Ochoa cocaine trafficking organization here in the United States in a two-day period. Payments for this type of equipment are almost always made in cash - sometimes suitcases full of cash - and are rarely refused.
The communication devices most commonly used by traffickers include state of the art radio equipment, communication scramblers, pocket pagers and encrypting devices. The equipment is used to prevent law enforcement interception of communication between traffickers. A scrambler, for example, attaches to an ordinary radio, and "scrambles" the normal radio frequency with a number of different codes. Only someone with a receiver coded to the particular scrambler frequency can decipher the transmitted message; the transmission is unintelligible to all other receivers. Digital encryption devices are used to send messages in code, and are often secured so that they can be accessed only after a security number is punched directly into the device. The security feature allows only members of the trafficking organization, who know the access code, to send or decipher coded messages. The speed with which a digital message is transmitted precludes radio tracking, at least by traditional triangulation.
Among the other specialized devices used by traffickers to detect and avoid law enforcement surveillance are radar altimeters, beacon-interrogating digital radar, position tracking equipment and long-range navigation instruments. Latest generation night vision goggles are also frequently used by traffickers flying at low altitudes in darkness. The strap-on goggles intensify any available light by a factor of 50,000 and greatly reduce a smuggler's risk of interdiction by allowing him to fly his aircraft without lights.
The Combined Effort
A number of independent Colombian trafficking organizations, among them the largest and most powerful operations, work in collaboration on individual smuggling ventures. As described by DEA special agent Michael Fredericks, the resulting organization is fluid:
There is a level of organization that may involve . . . a handful of people at the top. . . Below that level . . . there are many workers who move between one organization and another. . . It seems that in the Colombian organizations, a laboratory operator may work for 1 [specific] trafficker . . . and not even be aware of it simple because of the levels of insulation.
At the time of the preparation of this report, three men, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasques, and Carlos Enrique Lehder-Rivas, were reported to control the most significant trafficking organizations in Colombia. Known as "Los Grandes Mafiosos" in the Colombian press, each directs a separate organization, but the organizations work in concert and exchange personnel and equipment in various instances to maximize efficiency and profit. The resulting cartel system affords these traffickers numerous advantages, among them control over the price and the quality of Colombian cocaine, greater access to smuggling and processing equipment, and a wide variety of methods by which to avoid law enforcement.
A chart detailing a temporary cooperative venture based in Medellin, Colombia, between the Pablo Escobar organization and the Jorge Ochoa organization was confiscated from a mid-level trafficker involved in the operation, and was provided to the Commission by the Drug Enforcement Administration (Figure 2). As diagrammed, the Escobar and Ochoa organizations combined and divided the trafficking responsibilities typically completed by a single organization. The same component parts - labor, processing, transportation, finance and enforcement - were carried over from the individual organizations, with the Escobar group taking responsibility for production activities, and the Ochoa group handling enforcement and finances.
Colombia Cracks Down
Through the 1970's cocaine traffickers operated throughout Colombia with little interference, and in fact with considerable support from the Colombian government. The situation changed in April 1984 when drug traffickers assassinated Colombia's Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Lara's assassination came two months after he authorized a raid on a major cocaine processing plant known as Tranquilandia in Southeastern Colombia's Llanos region, which resulted in the destruction of over $1 billion worth of cocaine. Following Lara's assassination, Colombian President Belisario Betancur Cuartas declared a "war without quarter" on all drug smugglers and signed extradition orders for a number of known major traffickers. President Betancur also shifted trafficking trials to Colombia's military courts, increased eradication and interdiction efforts within his country, and increased regulation of those chemicals necessary for processing coca base into cocaine.
President Betancur's actions have had important ramifications both for traffickers and for other South and Central American governments. When the intensified Colombian programs became effective, a number of major traffickers, among them Escobar, Lehder and Ochoa, went into hiding and moved their processing operations to neighboring countries. In 1984 processing laboratories as well as stockpiles of essential conversion chemicals were discovered and destroyed in Panama, Venezuela, Mexico and Canada. Evidence suggests that significant processing activity is now also taking place in Nicaragua and Brazil. The Colombian regulation of ether and other essential precursor chemicals has resulted in an increase in cocaine processing activity in the United States: 21 processing laboratories were discovered and destroyed in South Florida in 1984 as opposed to 11 in 1983.
In March 1985 despite his status as a fugitive, Carlos Lehder appeared on Colombian television, filmed live from a jungle clearing by a Spanish film crew. Lehder used the television opportunity, which he had arranged, to appeal to the Colombian revolutionary organizations to participate in the "cocaine bonanza . . . the arm of the struggle against America." He also characterized cocaine as the "Achilles heel of American imperialism." Lehder disappeared into the jungle after the interview and remains at large, presumably in the remote jungles of Colombia.
Heroin Trafficking
Traditional Organized Crime: La Cosa Nostra and the French Connection
Heroin trafficking in this country first became big business in the 1920's, when organized criminals based in New York City's Jewish community began to control the importation and distribution of the drug. By the late 1930's, La Cosa Nostra joined the Jewish groups in the heroin enterprise, importing the drug from France, Asia and the Mideast. When these sources became inaccessible during World War II, Mexico became the major U.S. heroin supplier.
After the war, La Cosa Nostra took control of America's heroin market, this time importing most of its drug supply from Italian refineries. When the Italian government banned the manufacture of heroin in the early 1950's, La Cosa Nostra traffickers were forced to look to other sources. A new system was quickly devised, by which Turkish morphine base was refined to heroin in Marseilles, then shipped to Montreal or Sicily. Organized crime groups located in these transshipment points then sent the heroin directly to the United States. This arrangement, popularly known as the "French Connection," allowed La Cosa Nostra to monopolize the heroin trade from the 1980's through the early 1970's. During the peak French Connection years, the LCN controlled an estimated 95 percent of all of the heroin entering New York City, as well as most of the heroin distributed throughout the United States.
The La Cosa Nostra heroin monopoly lasted until 1972, when under diplomatic pressure from the United States, Turkey banned opium production and the French Connection collapsed. Amsterdam replaced Marseilles as the center of European heroin traffic, and Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami joined New York City as major U.S. distribution centers. Other trafficking groups rose to compete with the LCN for heroin dollars in New York City and throughout the country.
Source Country Traffickers: Mexico
In the five years after the collapse of the French Connection, Mexico became the major source of U.S. heroin. Mexico's rise was logical: the country contains extensive regions suitable for both opium cultivation and refining and shares a lightly guarded 2,000 mile border with the United States. Mexicans could manufacture heroin and smuggle it into the United States with little risk of detection. This simplified trafficking system resulted in increased Mexican heroin availability in the United States.
For generations, opium has been grown in remote areas of Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountain states of Durango, Sinaloa and Chihuahua. Culiacan, on the western side of the Sierra Madre, and Durango to the east, developed in the 1970's as major production centers for heroin destined for U.S. distribution. Trafficking organizations are now entrenched in these areas, and are involved in all phases of the heroin manufacture and distribution process. Opium gum is collected by peasants in isolated mountain areas and is transported by mule or carried by hand to nearby mountain villages. Typically, village middlemen sell the opium to a drug trafficking organization boss, who moves drugs to an organization-held laboratory for processing to heroin. Mexican couriers then transport the heroin to the members of the trafficking organization in the United States. The major Mexican heroin trafficking organizations supplying heroin to America are generally extended familial organizations, but loyal workers sometimes are given status as "quasi-family" members of the groups. The organizations work to eliminate competition and to control as completely as possible all aspects of the heroin trade. Members act as opium cultivators, village middlemen, and heroin brokers and distributors. In the United States, the organization typically controls distribution from the wholesaler to the retail distributor, but has little or no involvement in street distribution. This is seen as an unnecessarily risky and low-profit aspect of the business, and is left to outsiders.
Violence is an integral part of Mexican trafficking. Organization members provide cultivators with semi-automatic and automatic weapons to protect their crops; weapons are used throughout the trafficking system to eliminate informants, and to intimidate competitors and law enforcement officials. Corruption of Mexican police officials is well-documented and is essential to the smooth operation of the Mexican trafficking organizations.
In 1984, Mexican traffickers provided 32 percent share of the heroin consumed in the United States. The figure is expected to rise over the next several years due to the continued devaluation of the peso and improved agricultural technology.
Case Study: The Herrera Family
Since the early 1970's the Jamie Herrera-Navarres organization has been a major heroin smuggling power operative between Mexico and the United States. The Herrera organization is a confederation of families related by blood and marriage, although some non-family members have been accepted into the group over time. Older family members process opium and morphine base, younger members handle the drug sales and shipments in Mexico and in the United States. The Herrera organization is now estimated to have 3,000 to 5,000 members, a significant portion of whom are naturalized American citizens and illegal aliens residing in this country.
Despite the 1978 conviction and incarceration of Jamie Herrera, and several key family members, the organization remains active. In July 1985, 135 persons in the United States, comprising eight separate Herrera-related distribution rings, were indicted in Chicago on drug trafficking charges. These Herrera groups allegedly trafficked heroin and marijuana from Mexico through El Paso to a middleman in Texas. From Texas, the drugs were shipped to Chicago, then distributed throughout the country. This Herrera enterprise, only a small fragment of the total organization, is estimated to have had gross annual profits of over $200 million. The arrests are expected to have a significant effect on the Herrera organization, if only on a temporary basis.
Source Country Traffickers: Southeast Asia
Mexican heroin production decreased in the late 1970's due to enforcement, eradication and poor weather conditions. By 1980, Mexico provided only 25 percent of the heroin consumed in the United Stated, down from a peak level of 80 percent in 1975. At the same time, heroin production in Southeast Asia accelerated dramatically. By 1976, the "Golden Triangle" of Burma, Thailand and Laos supplied more than a third of the heroin consumed in the United States; Mexico supplied the remainder. Golden Triangle heroin first gained popularity with American servicemen stationed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War because it was readily available, inexpensive, and considerably more pure than Mexican heroin. After the war, Golden Triangle heroin was exported to the United States in increasing amounts.
Nearly 90 percent of the Golden Triangle opium is currently produced in Burma. Two-thirds of this crop is produced in the northeast area of the country, where control is shared by the Burmese Communist Party (BCP) and the Shan United Army (SUA). Both groups were at one time political insurgent organizations but are now almost entirely devoted to obtaining profit for the production, smuggling and sale of heroin base. They derive considerable income from "taxes" and fees they levy on opium growers and heroin producers and traffickers. This income is used to purchase weapons, to be utilized not in furtherance of political goals, but for protection of each group's narcotics enterprise. Traditionally, the two groups have coexisted peacefully: the BCP has acted as the major opium supplier in Southeast Asia and the SUA has been the area's major refiner and trafficker. The BCP has recently become involved in refining and distribution activities, and the organizations are currently in conflict.
Opium and morphine base produced in northeastern Burma transported by horse and donkey caravans to refineries along the Thailand-Burma border for conversion to heroin and heroin base. Most of the finished products are shipped across the border into various towns in North Thailand and down to Bangkok for further distribution to international markets. In the past major ethnic Chinese traffickers in Bangkok have controlled much of the foreign sales and movement of Southeast Asian heroin from Thailand, but a combination of law enforcement pressure, publicity and a regional drought has significantly reduced their role. As a consequence, many less-predominant traffickers in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand now control smaller quantities of the heroin going to international markets.
Although Thailand is the primary transit center for Southeast Asian heroin destined for international markets, alternate trafficking routes are increasingly utilized as a result of Thailand's sustained enforcement actions. Some opium, morphine base, and heroin base are moved South through Burma to southern Thailand and Malaysia for conversion to heroin in laboratories along the Thailand/Malaysia border. Refined heroin is also trafficked from Burma to India, then to the West.
Heroin from Southeast Asia is most frequently brought to the United States by couriers, typically Thai and U.S. nationals and Hong Kong Chinese, traveling on commercial airlines. California and Hawaii are the primary U.S. entry points for Golden Triangle heroin, but small percentages of the drug are trafficked into New York City and Washington D.C. While Southeast Asian groups have had success in trafficking heroin to the United States, they initially had difficulty arranging street level distribution. However, with the incarceration of Asian traffickers in American prisons during the 1970's, contacts between Asian and American prisoners developed. These contacts have allowed Southeast Asian traffickers access to individuals and organizations distributing heroin at the retail level.
Chinese organized crime groups, known as Triads, located primarily in Hong Kong, and their U.S. counterparts, Tongs, are positioned to participate in Southeast Asian heroin traffic, but the extent of their activity in these enterprises is not known at the present time. These organizations provide Asians direct access to criminal groups in the United States, and could potentially assume a significant role in U.S. heroin trafficking activities. Currently, there are major Triad organizations in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Toronto.
Source Country Traffickers: Southwest Asia
Opium production in Southeast Asia was significantly reduced in the late 1970's and early 1980's due to a prolonged drought. This decrease, along with the unstable political climate in the region caused by the fall of the ruling governments in South Vietnam and Laos, resulted in a reduction of Southeast Asian heroin exports to the United States. During this period, opium production in the Golden Crescent area of Southwest Asia, comprising the common border regions of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, markedly increased. In 1979 the Golden Crescent became the primary U.S. heroin source. Southwest Asia continues to be this country's major supplier: over one-half of the heroin entering the United States in 1984 originated as opium in the Golden Crescent.
The surge in Golden Crescent heroin exports to the United States can be attributed to a number of factors. Opium has always been grown in the region, but traditionally, opium grown in Afghanistan and Pakistan was shipped directly to Iran to supply that country's one million opium addicts. The situation changed dramatically after the 1980 fundamentalist revolution in Iran, as political and social instability allowed greatly increased domestic opium production and curtailed the demand for opium from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Iranian market was further closed to outsiders by the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which blocked several of the traditional smuggling routes into Iran.
Concurrent with the reduction in Iranian demand for non-domestic opium, growers in Afghanistan and Pakistan harvested record crops. The opium crop in Pakistan alone increased by 400 percent between 1974-1979, from 200 to 800 metric tons. Consequently Pakistani and Afghan traffickers learned to refine their opium into heroin, and sought new markets for their product, mainly in Western Europe and the and the United States.
Southwest Asian opium is grown in remote mountain areas and generally is transported to crude laboratories in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border areas. Most of the refineries are located in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province or Afghanistan's Nangarhai Province; many are clustered in the area of the Khyber Pass. Refined heroin leaves Pakistan via several routes: through Baluchistan to Iran and beyond; by sea through Karachi to Bombay and on to the Arabian Gulf States or Europe; overland through the Lahore area enroute to transit points in India; or by air through Islamabad or Karachi.
Southwest Asian heroin is typically smuggled into the United States concealed in legitimate shipments of air and sea cargo, such as textiles or sports equipment manufactured by Pakistani companies, or it is carried by air couriers. Couriers generally travel on commercial carriers, and many have connections with airline crews and station managers. The international postal system is also commonly used to ship heroin from Pakistan directly to the United States in sealed newspapers and periodicals.
Golden Crescent heroin is trafficked into the United States by a variety of narcotics organizations. The following is an overview of some of the more significant groups involved in the Southwest Asian heroin trade.
Pakistani Traffickers
Pakistani nationals are responsible for trafficking a significant percentage of Golden Crescent heroin in the United States, especially in the Northeast. The Pakistanis do not have a sophisticated retail sales network in the United States and typically rely on family or Pakistani friends in this country to distribute drugs. They also have relied on black trafficking organizations in Los Angeles, Detroit and New York, and with Italian organized crime in New York City. One Pakistani distribution system was described in testimony before this Commission by a Pakistani national who was incarcerated for his involvement in a distribution network. The Commission witness has relatives living both in Lahore, Pakistan, and in the United States; he was a resident of Houston, Texas and was employed as an engineer while involved in heroin trafficking. In the heroin operation, a family member in Lahore sent couriers to JFK airport in New York with heroin concealed in false-bottom luggage. From JFK, the couriers traveled "in transit" to La Guardia, then on to Toronto. Because of their "in transit" status, Customs Service officials did not search the travelers in the United States, and Canadian Customs inspection was not difficult to clear.
In Canada, traffickers often held a particular heroin shipment for three to six months, until appropriate distribution contacts were established and it was certain that law enforcement officials were not aware of the shipment. At that time, distribution contacts traveled by automobile to Toronto, picked up a portion or all of the heroin shipment, and drove the heroin into the United States without Customs interdiction. This particular network supplied heroin to Seattle, Houston, San Francisco, New York and Las Vegas. The contacts were all related by blood or marriage.
Pakistanis also rely on the international postal system to move drugs from Southwest Asia to the United States. In July 1983, for example, U.S. Customs officials at JFK Airport seized one kilogram of heroin concealed in rolled newspapers destined for Pakistani nationals residing in New York. The package had been sent from the United Arab Emirates. Two other packages, each containing one-half kilogram of heroin, were mailed to Berkeley, California from the same source. Rolled newspapers and magazines can conceal up to one kilogram of heroin and are generally sealed in plastic. Drugs are also sent through the mail concealed in shipments of textiles, clothing and other durable goods.
Lebanese Traffickers
A portion of Golden Crescent heroin passes through Lebanon en route to the United States, thus affording Lebanese nationals an opportunity to become involved in the trafficking activity. A significant percentage of the heroin exported from Lebanon leaves via Damascus International Airport.
In the United States, trafficking by Lebanese nationals is especially prevalent in the Northeast. In one network, non-Lebanese couriers primarily from Canada traveled to Damascus and Beirut to pick up heroin which they then transported to Houston, Detroit and New York via commercial carrier. Heroin was concealed in false-bottom luggage and inside photo albums. The heroin was transferred to Lebanese nationals living in Toronto and Ontario, Canada, and in various cities in the United States. Some of the money generated from the sale of this heroin was laundered in banks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
India
A proportion of the heroin traditionally distributed abroad through the Pakistan cities of Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta is now being shipped through Bombay and New Dehli. Traffickers smuggle Southwest Asian heroin into India along the Indo-Pakistan border and transport it overland to the Indian cities; Southeast Asian heroin is brought into Bombay and Calcutta by sea and overland routes. Bombay, Calcutta and New Dehli are now major staging, shipping and trafficking centers for heroin smuggled to the West. Trafficking activity is frequent at Perlane Airport in Dehli and at Bombay's Sahar International Airport, and Indian harbors and airports are used by Pakistani, Afghan and Indian traffickers as points of embarkation to Western destinations.
West Africa.
In the past three years, West African countries, especially Nigeria, have been documented as transshipments centers for Golden Crescent heroin. Nigerian couriers based in Lagos travel to Pakistan to obtain heroin, then continue on commercial flights to their final destinations, or return to Nigeria to repackage the narcotics into smaller amounts for smuggling to the West.
A number of loosely associated Nigerian heroin trafficking organizations have connections both with suppliers in Pakistan and with retailers in Western Europe and the United States. Typically, Nigerian couriers travel directly to Karachi on commercial aircraft and purchase heroin in that city, but some couriers continue to Peshawar to make their purchases. Couriers return to Nigeria transiting other countries in Africa and Europe. A different group of couriers, usually students or poor residents of Lagos, traffic the drugs to Europe or the United States.
Couriers typically enter the United States directly through JFK airport in New York although in some cases, they come to this country via cities in Europe and Canada. Drugs are concealed in body cavities, and in false-bottom suitcases.
After the heroin arrives in the United States, it is sold only to one or two American distributors in a given area. Distribution networks are most active in New York City and Washington, D.C. and are operative in Los Angeles, Houston and Boston. DEA reports that individuals in nearly every community of Nigerian nationals in the United States has some link to heroin traffickers and couriers. Profits from heroin sales are laundered through banks in the United States in Britain.
The Post-French Connection LCN
Traditional organized crime continues to play a significant role in this country's heroin trade through the 1980's. The LCN's long established connections with criminal organizations in Sicily facilitate the movement of heroin from Europe to the United States, and while Sicily is no longer a major refinery for heroin, the country is a major transshipment center for Southwest and Southeast Asian heroin. Sicilian organizations supply LCN affiliates with heroin; LCN networks either distribute the drug themselves or sell it in large quantities to major distributors.
The LCN As A Supplier: The Nicky Barnes Operation
Black criminal groups have controlled some percentage of heroin traffic in New York City since the 1940's. Their influence increased significantly in the early 1970's, after the French Connection. The first major independent black trafficking organization, a group of over one hundred distributors and couriers, was headed by Charles Green. The Green organization imported heroin and cocaine from South America and distributed the drugs throughout New York City during the late 1960's. Green was arrested in 1970, control of this heroin network passed to Frank Matthews. Matthews was brought in to the heroin business by Louis Cirillo, a major LCN associate, and was continually supplied with LCN heroin.
Leroy "Nicky" Barnes succeeded Matthews in 1971. Under his leadership, the organization controlled heroin sales and manufacture throughout New York State into Canada and Pennsylvania. The Barnes operation was well-organized and lucrative. By 1976, Barnes had at least seven major lieutenants under his direction; each of them controlled a dozen mid-level distributors, who in turn supplied up to forty street-level retailers. Barnes at all times remained well insulated from the daily trafficking activities, and maintained a wealthy lifestyle. He owned five homes, a Mercedes, a Maserati, several Lincolns, Cadillacs and Thunderbirds, and hundreds of suits and coats. He estimates that his total trafficking income was at least several million dollars.
Barnes joined with six other major New York dealers to form a heroin cartel called the "Council" in the mid 1970's. Members of the Council pooled funds to purchase multi-kilo amounts of heroin, worked to ensure a consistent supply of the drug in their distribution area, combined their "cutting" and distribution networks in certain cases, and often used a common sources for diluents, weapons, automobiles and other resources. The Council had specific "departments" which arranged legal services, security and enforcement, and financial services including money laundering.
Barnes' most significant source of heroin, to whom he directed other Council members, was LCN associate "Natty" Madonna. Despite Barnes' assertion and belief that the Council worked completely independently of the Mafia, through the Madonna connection, LCN heroin was prevalent in Harlem traffic from 1972 to 1976.
The Asian-LCN Links
La Cosa Nostra actively seeks out Asian nationals as connections to heroin sources in Southeast Asia. In testimony before the President's Commission on organized crime, Franklin Liu, a veteran Hong Kong clothier, explained how he was recruited as a courier for a New York La Cosa Nostra family involved in heroin trafficking. Liu, who held a legitimate four year business visa which allowed him to travel without restriction, was first contacted by Antonio Turano, a reputed member of the Sicilian Mafia, in connection with Turano's money laundering operations. In one instance, Turano brought Liu a suitcase filled with $400,000 cash, and requested that Liu wire the money to a bank in Zurich. Turano met with Liu in Milan in the course of the operation to make certain that the money had been wired without incident.
At a later date, after Liu had successfully participated in a number of money laundering operations, Turano asked Liu if he had any connections to drug traffickers in the Far East; Liu did not. Turano arranged a connection, and agreed to pay Liu $5,000 for every kilo of heroin he trafficked into the United States. Liu was subsequently contacted by Turano's agent, a Thai woman, and arranged to meet her at a hotel in New York City. When they met, each held half of a one dollar bill given to them by Turano as identification. Liu gave the woman his car keys; the next day she returned the car with heroin in the trunk and requested a payment of $40,000 in cash and a $60,000 bank check. When Liu went to collect the money from Turano, he found that Turano had been arrested. Liu was subsequently arrested and convicted on charges of conspiracy to import heroin in connection with this case.
The Pizza Connection
During the late 1970's and early 1980's members of La Cosa Nostra in the United States allegedly cooperated with the Sicilian Mafia in a drug trafficking conspiracy which resulted in the importation of heroin worth over $1.6 billion into the United States. In April, 1984, 38 individuals were indicted on charges related to the trafficking operation, popularly known as the "Pizza Connection." The network that developed to facilitate the traffic in this enterprise was reputedly one of the largest heroin importation operations in history, and used pizza parlors throughout this country to distribute heroin smuggled from Southeast and Southwest Asia via Sicily to the United States. Additional heroin that was trafficked through this system was produced in laboratories operating in Sicily.
According to the indictment in the case, the "Pizza Connection" heroin network relied upon a faction of the New York Bonanno organized crime family headed by Salvatore Catalano to distribute the heroin in this country. In turn, the heroin business of this Bonanno crime faction was tied directly to organized criminal groups in Sicily, the rest of Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and Brazil. Direct evidence of the existence of the network was first obtained in 1980 when couriers were observed transferring enormous amounts of cash through investment houses and banks in New York city to Italy and Switzerland. Tens of millions of dollars derived from heroin sales in this country were transferred overseas in this fashion, apparently in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.
Investigations related to the "Pizza Connection" case have revealed that factions of the Sicilian Mafia operate in the United States independently of the American La Cosa Nostra. While the two groups apparently cooperate on certain ventures such as the "Pizza Connection" heroin importation operations, they appear to be distinct and separate organizations under different leadership.
Drug and Cultural Survival in the Golden Triangle
Nations, countries, are artificial, boundaries more wishful thinking on the part of moneyed power-mongers than dividing, restricting realities; one must learn of important regional neighbors to understand any specific place. China without knowledge of Mongolia or Russia would be a confusing picture which Confucianism certainly can’t explain; examining Spain without acknowledging Islamic impact would be like looking at a Hollywood-movie wild-west town false-front. Many think the USA its own thing, dominating Canada and Mexico but hardly influenced by them, but that’s less than silly.
Unfortunately, there’s little morality in big business or international politics. Governments protect business and wealth, often little more than feigning concern with public welfare; education is especially poorly managed. Governments seldom encourage indigenous self-sufficiency, close-to-nature and/or obdurately traditional; only occasionally are governments far-sighted. Power doesn’t like to share, so certain essential vitality doesn’t come to it. And indeed, the meek remain when power is gone (although always, new replacement powers come along).
With Dutch government financial backing, writer Guy Horton says he’s documented slave labor, systematic rape, conscription of child soldiers, massacres and deliberate destruction of villages, food sources and medical services, along the Myanmar side of the Thai frontier and most especially in Shan and Karen States. He presented evidence meeting the standards of international law in a 600-page report, “Dying Alive: A Legal Assessment of Human Rights Violations in Burma” (2005). “Typically,” Horton said, “the army will move into a village, confiscate anything of value, slaughter the animals, and destroy the cooking pots and looms. The village is burned and usually mined. The inhabitants are relocated to a new site, usually with inadequate food and water, where they’re forced into labor schemes such as road-building. In the long run, many just can’t survive.” Horton also ran across numerous Burmese army defectors. International reaction remains lame.
Sanctions against Iraq before the second U.S. invasion caused as much death as Saddam Hussein and both recent US/Iraq wars - deaths mostly of babies, at that. Israel, perhaps more hypocritical for being a state more based on religion, gladly offers Myanmar dangerous weapons while bemoaning Palestinian barbarity. Thailand has used its weapons successfully only on its own people (excepting Thai airmen of WWI fighting in France; some served in Korea, and over 10,000 in Vietnam, but Thailand’s been a laudably peaceable neighbor - whilst in the few clashes it’s had, not militarily dazzling), yet because media is owned by businessmen doing business with other businessmen who’re often in government, need to purchase ever larger quantities of ever more powerful and of weapons isn’t questioned (also, now one doesn’t need an external enemy; there are always ‘terrorists’). International Law has become less meaningful since the USA became the sole ‘Superpower’ (bully) - in the mode of Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, soon to be espoused by China. The world’s largest, and perhaps shakiest, democracy, India refuses to impose sanctions on Myanmar; China, with few pretensions to morality, is a major Myanmar trading partner; so are Thailand, Korea and Singapore. Japanese invested heavily until they found funds brought in had to stay, but their government still gives aid. Sanctions in Iraq didn’t work, and Myanmar is considered ‘isolated’ (like North Korea), but without the considerable (and indefensible) support from other countries (and mega-corps), the (literal) rape of Myanmar by its rulers could not continue. But for over a generation, Myanmar’s military regime has inflicted over 10,000 violent deaths annually.
The supposed cultural hegemony which Thailand advertises and Myanmar’s Burmese warlords try to ‘promote’ begs acknowledgement of refugees, overtly racist acts common at almost all levels, and Islamic discontent. While many Muslims and tribal people are well adjusted and even well integrated, there are substantial numbers who are not. The problem seems to rest primarily on insidious greed and economic colonialism: self-reliant/self-sufficient farmers (or herders, or hunter-gatherers for that matter) just don’t pay much tax, or much provide for, or pander to, power! Something artificial and destructive is being imposed – in the name of progress. The volatile situation in Thailand’s south, where Yawi-speaking people of close cultural similarity to their Malay neighbors have been treated like second-class citizens and are now subject to separatist or government-inspired violence, gets major (albeit misguided) attention, while a potentially more dangerous circumstance festers to the north. Both give possible justification for indulgence in giant military purchases (big toys for big boys).
When Britain annexed the Shan States in 1887, colonialists pushed opium production, producing it under license in Kokang, Loimaw and the Wa states (where it’d been grown for local consumption). About 40 tons per year were made in the late 1940s. Then arrival of Kuomintang (KMT) troops beaten by Communists caused increased production. A famous quote by KMT General Tuan Shi-Wen goes: “To fight [communists] you must have an army and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium.” A CIA website says leading producers of opium are hill-tribe people of Southeast Asia who “live under very primitive conditions with no electricity and no running water. They are very poor - opium is their currency, and it is sold or traded for basic necessities like food, clothing, and utensils. Opium is also used locally as a substitute for modern medicines because few medical supplies are available in these remote areas.” Well, that’s changed – methamphetamines, once ya-ma horse medicine, then ya-ba crazy medicine, are now “ya kai”, medicine you sell (or perhaps “hard-working pills”, as in kaiyan: industrious, assiduous), among people north of the Thai border.
In 1962 the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ of General Ne Win ruined private business outside the black market (which expanded); manufactured goods remained available only from trade of opium and heroin for Thai products. Daw AungSan SuuKyi returned in 1988; rallies against despotism erupted; the junta ordered demonstrators fired on, killing thousands. In reasonably fair elections (1990), the National League for Democracy won 82% of seats in the national assembly - support for Daw SuuKyi was overwhelming, except within the military and in Shan State, which voted for Shans. SuuKyi’s father, independence hero Aung San, persuaded independent ethnic leaders to accept his negotiation for terms ending British colonial rule by promising choice for secession, after ten years, to the Shan, Karen and Kachin. He was assassinated just before independence, and his promises became void. SuuKyi is English educated; her husband (now deceased) was English, her children are in England. This English influence worries Myanmar’s generals, who suspect English complicity in the assassination. As with many things in Myanmar, the military’s intentions in holding that election remain hard to comprehend, but it seems they failed to take Daw SuuKyi’s great charisma into account.
Infrastructure is substandard, with regular, wide-spread power-shortages (outages), and most gasoline purchased on the black market (from the military). The currency worthless not only out-side the country but many places in it as well. Than Shwe (pronounced “shoo-ee”), Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council, which took over government as SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Committee) 16 years before making this outrageous proclamation, says, “The Tatmadaw {armed forces, pronounced tah-mah-doe} will systematically hand over state power to the public, the original owner.” Sure. More likely, Burma will implode, as Eastern European communist regimes did, but the populace is cowed, demoralized, terrified.
Way underdeveloped, but frequently charming and picturesque, like a place somehow out of another time, Burma is potentially rich. The hospitality industry barely achieves a low standard, education and healthcare are abysmal, but Burmese (as opposed to Chin, Shan, Karen, etc.) culture thrives, magnificently free of commercial globalization.
This will change though, as deforestation is proceeding faster even than in the Amazon. Thai jungles are gone; landslides cover roads, houses, people… rainfall and river levels are down, cement has become regarded as a positive aesthetic, and as things get hotter, the potential for virulent disease spreads. SLORC acknowledged over 400,000 HIV-positive people in Myanmar in 1996 - more realistically it’s over a million and possibly 4% of population (in 2003 over 2% of military recruits were). The highest rates of HIV infection in both China and India are along their Myanmar borders.
Burma has about 135 ethnic groups (over twice as many as China). Besides Myanmars or Burmans, there are Kachin, Karenni (Kayah or Kayan), Karen, Chin, Arakanese, Mon and Shan, for which States have been named, related tribes, tribes of Tibetan or Mongoloid origin, including Mizo, Lahu, and Palaung, and the indigenous Naga and Wa. Most have their own armies, largely for protection from the Burmese Tatmadaw. Other armed forces include descendent remnants of the KMT and Burmese Communist Party, an ‘All-Burma Students Democratic Front’, totally mercantile drug-trade protection organizations and armed bandits (in the last few decades, several hundred groups). The total number of rebel armies at one time once was 26; most accepted cease-fire with the government, in hopes of development-help or other economic gains, but there remain about 125,000 non-governmental armed, trained and organized soldiers (some merely boys); figures for insurgent fighters are lower as they exclude commercial armies. The Shan, largest of Burma’s ethnic minorities, once comprised a third of the country’s population (now about 48 million). 10% of Shan men may be HIV positive; many Shan (and Karen) have fled to Thailand. With little else available to them, they’re reliant on traditional herbal understandings, and often have but unreliable access to even that form of help. The potential for survival of Shan culture, and that of other minority cultures in Myanmar, is becoming as if-y as in/with next-door Thailand, under globalization.
The military has doubled over 20 years, to 350,000 soldiers, despite no imminent external threat. In this time, almost half of Myanmar government monies have gone to the violent, terrorizing Tatmadaw, but moral is low, with little civilian support outside families dependent on army money. Still, conflicting politics, lack of geographic commonalty, historic animosities, communication difficulties, religious differences, and incompatible financial support bases make rebel unification, or victory, unlikely. In addition to Buddhist, Moslem and Christian rivalries, there are animistic and charismatic cults, and feuding clans. The Karen and Mon are anti-narcotic, but sometimes provoke each other. Internal strife led to the fall (after almost 40 years) of the Karen headquarters at Mannerplaw (not far from the Thai town Mae Sam Laep, on the Salween River) - Buddhist soldiers were dissatisfied with Christian leadership.
China sold SLORC F-7 fighter-bombers and two frigates (to be fitted with surface-to-surface missiles), in return asking for a naval base, or at least refueling rights for submarine and aircraft carriers, in the Bay of Bengal, on Coco Island in the Indian Ocean and at Zedetkyi Kyun (St Matthew’s Island) off Tenasserim (close to the Straits of Malacca). They got the refueling rights. Growing influence of large oil and gas companies, some of which China is buying into if not trying to buy outright (Unocal), could add to Chinese political pressure in the area. SLORC spends more on ‘defense’ than any other country in the Asia-Pacific region; its air force has helicopters, fighters and ground attack aircraft, mostly from China. In 2003 North Korean technicians installed surface-to-surface missiles on Burma Navy vessels; eighty 75mm howitzers (mountain guns) came from India. From Russia came eight combat aircraft (and its Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) contracted to construct a nuclear reactor, for which North Korea is also supplying assistance). China gives “friendship prices” for arms, and overlooks payment deadlines. Myanmar exports gas, gems, timber, agricultural produce and other natural resources, yet can’t get along without drug money. Trade sanctions from the West exacerbate this dependency: Tatmadaw units in tribal areas operate under a self-support policy, and so rely on drug trade. Opium has spread to places which prior to 1962 had had little or none: Karenni (Kayah), Kachin and Chin States, plus Mandalay, Sagaing and Magwe divisions of Burma Proper. But amphetamines are now the bigger earner.
The USA plays typically hypocritical games in the region: it tries to keep Taiwan defended while pumping investment into China, its main currency supporter, with whom it has a trade deficit of over $100 billion a year. China has shored up the dollar with bond purchases of over a trillion dollars. It utilized American policies and trade to grow, while acquiring US-made jet engines for warplanes it sold to Myanmar. Peasant uprisings in China take ever more violent turns, with rural communities becoming less credulous and submissive, and abandoning hope of economic trickledown… Burmese know their government doesn’t help them (for them, government always has always been oppressive, but many accept a necessity for unresponsive authority), while Thais, Chinese and even Americans (yes, Mexicans and Canadians, surely) are learning how dangerously - even to their small lives - power corrupts…
Opium was used in early Siam, not only medicinally, but to calm war elephants and make them more handle-able in battle. In the same year that the British started cutting teak (1826), a British merchant tried to sell opium imported to Bangkok illegally (from India, via Singapore), but wasn’t successful.
Chinese working in Southeast Asia are documented smoking opium in Java as early as the 1620s; in 1702 Siam got laws rewarding help confiscating opium. King Rama I prohibited both consumption and trade in it. But in 1855, emboldened by success in China and advances into Burma and the Malay peninsula, Britain forced the Bowring Treaty on Siam; as mentioned above; this gave British subjects exemption from Thai legal and made opium a legal commodity (supposedly, anyway), with no import duty. In reality opium was made legal only for un-naturalized ethnic Chinese. An opium tax soon brought in over 15% of tax revenues. In 1906 an Opium Department was established, so the government could distribute, sell and supervise opium dens. In the dens, not only opium, but tea, was served. Thais preferred betel (which Rama VI began to discourage about 1930, while also encouraging a change to more modern clothing).
In 1824 tea plants in India had first been noticed by Westerners, growing in frontier hills between Burma and Assam state; but in the 1830s, tea still came only from China. Indian (or Ceylon) tea has come to dominate the world market, but back then tea was still a Chinese thing; the British still needed to learn the process by which it’s cured, to produce it for themselves and their trading partners. After many botched attempts, they succeeded in the 1860s, and began to produce tea in Assam and Darjeeling, northeastern India. But to finance their taste for tea, the British long found only opium, to provide them with a trade balance. Homegrown opium, eaten rather than smoked, had long supplied most Chinese needs; the British changed this by introducing tobacco, soon often smoked with opium. Britain accounted for over 80% of the opium smuggling trade – ‘necessary’ to meet its demand for tea; eventually they resorted to force to continue bringing opium from India to China (the “Opium Wars”).
In 1793, British ambassador Lord Macartney collected shoots of tea plants and took them Bengal, with samples of soil where they’d grown; Macartney achieved little towards friendly relations, or trust, between China and Britain – and subsequent embassies weren’t as well treated. Opium smuggling became totally out of control, and relations between Britain and China became unstable (when not openly hostile).
By the mid-1830s opium had become the most traded single commodity in the world. In early 1800s Siam, its popularity was largely due to Chinese laborers come to work constructing canals across the central plains. Soon there were many working on boats and docks, as laborers, craftsmen, rice millers, tobacco growers and shop-workers. Siam’s Chinese population became the largest in Southeast Asia, reaching 440,000 in 1821 (and constituting half of Bangkok by 1880), and with the Chinese came opium. In 1811 King Rama II banned its sale and consumption; in 1839 Rama III ordered the death penalty for major traffickers. But legislative efforts failed, especially as British merchant captains, even before Bowring, were largely immune to prosecution; if a British captain was arrested, the British embassy pressed for his release, and soon the captain could smuggle in another cargo. In 1852, King Mongkut (Rama IV) bowed to British pressure and established a royal opium franchise, leased to a wealthy Chinese.
Pressed for revenues to finance public works, European colonial governments in Asia established opium farms, then leased them to Chinese merchants. By 1900, each Southeast Asian state, from Burma to the Philippines, had either an opium monopoly or an officially licensed franchise. In 1905-1906, opium sales provided 16% of taxes for French Indochina, 16% for the Netherlands Indies, 20% for Siam, and a whopping 53% for British Malaya. In 1930, Southeast Asia had 6,441 government opium dens, serving tons of opium to 542,100 registered smokers, but it didn’t become a significant opium producer until the 1950s. Poppy cultivation spread in the highlands during the decades before World War II, but the region remained a minor producer – mostly due to state monopoly fears of lowered prices.
In 1892, the Thai government for 16% of its revenues from opium taxes; that rose to over 20% in 1908, and from 1912 to 1919, then dropped back. In 1927, opium shops were made state owned. A 1938 Opium Act ordered severe penalties for smuggling or illicit dealing, but in 1939 permits were given to hill-tribe people in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Nan provinces, to grow opium for the government. After WWII, imports from India and Turkey resumed; in 1959 opium was again made completely illegal.
That under 1% of the population (57,500 opium smokers were counted in 1939, 71,200 in 1941… realistically, there may have been 2 or 3 times that) supplied 15 to even 24% of revenues, especially as many of those taxed were rickshaw pullers and very low-wage laborers, may defy credulity, but one must note that cash, and tax, were then of smaller general significance. Corveé labor, import duties, the benefits of land control, spoils of war and perhaps other matters (including bribes) may have had greater significance.
When Britain finally abandoned the Asian drug trade in 1907, opium was as entrenched as coffee, tea and alcohol. China's harvest of over 35,000 tons supplied 13.5 million addicts, 27% of its adult males, and represented about 85% of world production. A League of Nations eradication campaign in 1925 got governments to restrict imports and close opium dens, but smugglers serviced the continued demand. Thailand and Indochina couldn’t close their mountainous borders to caravan trade from Yunnan; with 50 % of the region's smokers and 70% of its dens, Bangkok and Saigon were premier markets.
Much as the British encouraged opium growing, their rivals the French did also, although quite a bit later. The cost of running Indochina (which the French started to take only as late as 1858, then absorbing under total suzerainty in 1893) soon got out of hand; French colonial administrators started encouraging growing of opium to raise taxes (and line their own pockets) in the early 1900s. Later, they needed even more funding for increasing numbers of troops. When they officially outlawed it in the early 50s, their intelligence service, the Deuxieme, took over wholesaling the product, and soon used it to repay the Corsican Mafia for helping the Resistance in WWII (much as parts of the US government made arrangements with Italian mobsters). As in Burma, after the 1949 Communist success in China, opium was used to finance anti-Chinese activity in Indochina; as it also proved useful for suppressing results of anger and discontent, before long heroin was readily accessible in most large Western cities, and even, it can be well said, significant in Western affairs.
The Chinese Communists, vehemently anti-opium (although it’s said Chao En-lai/Zhao Enlai, Communist Chian’s first Premier, had been an opium smoker), waged a successful anti-opium campaign from the time of their victory; by the mid-50s, there was little cultivation in mainland China. The last growers were Wa in Ximeng Wa Autonomous County, Simao District, Yunnan. Even they stopped in the early 1960s. The Communist Party of Burma also suppressed opium; they encouraged crop substitutions in northern Shan State and further south along the Chinese border, including in Kokang and the Wa hills, which nevertheless remained the region’s main producers. Having lost China’s support in 1968, the CPB took over Shan State’s Wa and Kokang regions, and in 1982 began to officially tax opium farming. In 1989, Kokang and Wa CPB troops, dissatisfied with their predominantly ethnic Burmese leadership, mutinied. The new leadership entered the drug trade.
In 1961 the Nationalist Chinese KMT’s “Lost Army” moved into Thailand, many to take up residence at Doi MaeSalong in Chiangrai, where Muslims of Chinese descent already lived. The KMT planted round pears (‘sali’), plums and tea, but also continued in the opium business they’d entered into while in Shan State, Burma.
Northern Thailand was still sparsely populated and undeveloped into the early 1970s, by which time drug money had become the dominant force and the area called the “Golden Triangle”. Communist activity kept the United States interested even after the Vietnam War; such interest increased proportional to American consumption of drugs produced in Tai Yai hills. Communist insurgency in the north wasn’t strong, in part due to drug-producing KMT army remnants, but in the early 60s, Thailand’s northern border had “unknown areas”.
In 1982 powerful drug-lord Khun Sa was pushed out, and by 1990, a Royal Foundation directed by the King’s Mother, Princess Mother Sangwan Sri Nakarin, or colloquially, Mae Fa Luang &/or Somdet Ya, took great interest in the north, and did much to successfully contain, if not end, illicit drug production in Thailand. But drug lords in Shan State (including Khun Sa) increased output. ChiangRai was still a small town and in many ways decades out of date (though not so much as KengTung (KyaingTawng), capital of Myanmar’s Shan State, remains today). The wife of a USA Drug Enforcement Agency agent’s was murdered in an attempt at intimidation &/or retribution, in ChiangRai in the late 80s.
As late as 1984, in Huai Krai, 15 km south of Mae Sai on Highway1, an Opium Warlord was even issuing his own paper currency. The various groups (Communists, drug armies and KMT) gave up their weapons during amnesty programs of the late 1980s, and the area became amenable for tourism. Although the KMT armed forces dispersed in the mid-1980s, networks established by the Shan State KMT still operate; whether army and police officers in Thailand and Laos are still in the trade may be open to question, but of course it is denied, and dangerous to investigate. That active members of Myanmar’s Tatmadaw army, and other Burmese officials, are still actively engaged in it, is much less open to question; it is widely accepted that many still are.
Khun Sa
For years the largest insurgent force in Southeast Asia was the Khun Sa’s Mong T’ai Army (MTA). Zao Khunsa (the “Prince of Prosperity” referred to in media usually as Khun Sa, originally Chan Cheefu or Zhang Qifu, hereditary Loimaw headman) made America’s “Most Wanted” list, ’though he was never in America: a Brooklyn, New York court indicted him on heroin trafficking (narcotics racketeering) charges. He died in 2007, while living in an Inya Lake villa in Yangon (Rangoon)…
Brief background: Lo Hsing-han/Law Sit Han, a major warlord/drug-lord, started in the early 1960s as a gofer, assisting poppy-growing Kokang royalty. Lo got command of a ‘KKY’ junta-sanctioned militia, and worked with KMT General Li Mi (of the KMT), sending opium to Thailand. In ’93, General Khin Nyunt (long head of Burmese Intelligence but now under house arrest) assured him safe-smuggling of heroin from Kokang to the Thai border at Tachilek.
Tachilek has the only airport in Burma within walking distance of another country; flights from Rangoon or Mandalay bring Burmese officers with parcels of bank notes to carry over the Mai Sai bridge, Tachilek’s link to international banking. Mae Sai, Thailand’s northernmost point, is an ultimate in proverbial border towns; the area’s Shan, Tatmadaw, Wa and Thai soldiers have frequently clashed; all of these and more rake untaxed income from dodgy dealings, but who should judge? Golden Triangle drug barons are hardly less moral than Europeans who “settled” the American West, the CIA or many Americans working prisons… Now frequently used for Thai-visa extension purposes, the border was only opened to tourists in fall, 1994. Although non-Thai visitors weren’t allowed beyond the town itself, I went to take a look. It seemed poor but light-hearted; I saw kids playing on stilts, and small roadside gambling hovels. There were antiques and handicrafts, but nothing distantly approximating what was available in Mae Sot (on the western border Salween River). The only well-organized business I noticed was the Mae Sai gem market. Burmese currency, kyat, was not then, nor is now, used in Tachilek; just Thai baht. Tachilek reportedly had as many as 14 heroin refineries in the past; now it has a Tatmadaw base and a busy market with a plethora of cheap Chinese goods, some jungle products and carved teak, and pirated CDs and DVDs. On my first visit, I was amazed to see a man in fatigue jacket which instead of a name above the pocket, said “It takes balls to rule the world.” Of many postcards I sent out from there, none arrived.
Lo (or Law) Hsing-han has moved to Yangon to live with a son doing active business with Singaporians, but still owns poppy fields in the Tang-yang area. In 1973, while leading the largest opium militia and a coalition of most Shan rebel groups, he sent a proposal to the US government inviting American experts to help with poppy eradication by buying the current crop for US$12 million. A Thai helicopter came to take Lo for negotiations, but once away from his army, he was arrested, deported to Burma and sentenced to death - later commuted to eight years in jail. The DEA suppressed the proposals.
KhunSa, similarly captured by Rangoon authorities (in 1969) was freed in ’73, after supporters kidnapped two Russian doctors and got Thai General Kriangsak Chomanan (soon prime minister) to negotiate his release. He revived the proposals, and invited members of a US Congressional committee on narcotics to visit his base at Ban HinTaek, ChiangRai. US officials visited, but President Carter’s administration instead started an $80 million gift program (over 14 years), to the junta.
For a decade Khun Sa had about 4000 armed men: the SUA (Shan United Army). The DEA planted tracking devices up the asses of opium caravan mules, but the Burmese, given precise coordinates, intercepted nary a convoy. In January 1982, Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanan had Thai troops attack KhunSa at HinTaek (which subsequently became Ban Thoed Thai); after three days, the SUA scattered. KhunSa and remnant troops drove some KMT and Lahu soldiers out of borderland Doi Lang, and temporarily settled there, but a Chinese officer (who later become SUA chief of staff) proposed something better: setting up headquarters at HoMong, across the border from sparsely populated MaeHongSon, and practically inaccessible from anywhere else. A road from Thailand was put in; troops rallied back. Shan State heroin lords (despite his denials, including KhunSa) increased their output. In ChiangRai, in the late ’80s still a small town and in many ways decades out of date (though not so much as KengTung remains today), the wife of a US DEA agent was murdered in an attempt at intimidation &/or retribution. By 1990, a Royal Foundation directed by the King’s Mother was successfully containing drug production in northern Thailand.
In 1985, 10,000 soldiers of the Shan United Revolutionary Army under Col. YawdSerk joined to form the Mong T’ai Army (MTA), which in 1993 had its first sustained, concentrated attack from the Tatmadaw. The situation looked dangerous; KhunSa adopted an even more fervently nationalist posture. On December 13, 1993, he declared an independent Shan State. More soldiers joined; the MTA grew to 25,000. In 1994 HoMong grew to 20,000 and even had facilities for overseas phone calls (Christopher Cox of the Boston Herald says 10,000, but also says Chiang Saen means “trumpeting elephant” and that “Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Manchu empire”). Surely well over a hundred journalists, photographers, NGO staffers and adventurers traveled to the Thai/Myanmar border to see KhunSa, as did I. Khun Sa offered to eradicate Shan opium/heroin supply in return for security and stability for his people, who were violently threatened by the Burmese. The price would have been a tiny fraction of American tax dollars spent on surveillance, interdiction, incarceration, rehabilitation, hospitalization, etc. “Persuade the government of Burma to return to the legal constitution of Burma, because the drug trade can only flourish in a state of anarchy”, he asked. Thirty years later, the anarchy, and drug trade, still flourish. Shans request for help with crop substitution, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure met little response, but captivated my interest; I decided to see what I could do to help.
This situation began to develop when dreams of an independent Shan State were shattered by a mutiny in June 1995 (at least for the time; it keeps, quixotically, or chauvinistic in the sense of being hopeless, popping up again). The MTA’s officer-training school’s second in command, KanYot [GunYod or Kan Ywet], incensed at despotism and racial discrimination by those with Chinese blood, revolted. He and 200 soldiers left. 1500 MTA soldiers went to negotiate with the mutineers, hardly 10% returned. Rumors of KhunSa’s ill-health were becoming believed (there were so many, so absurd rumors before, such as the killing of a barber for a bad hair-cut, that they often weren’t taken seriously); weariness was showing in his face. When the Wa launched their winter ’95 offensive against the Shan, desertions caused outpost after outpost to fall; some claim the central headquarters would have also, within days, if surrender hadn’t brought in the Tatmadaw - but that’s conjecture.
KhunSa’s surrender caught most observers by surprise, and it’s clear not all weapons were turned over - Stinger and SAM-7 missiles believed to be there weren’t. KhunSa called a session of Shan parliament to make a surprise announcement of immediate retirement; it seems he also betrayed those who hadn’t betrayed him to revenge those who had, demonstrating the correctness of their suspicions (and meanwhile destroying the Shan cause). KhunSa moved to Yangon New Years Day 1996, renounced his Shan name and took a Burmese one. According to the ‘New Light of Myanmar’, 1,894 recruits and 138 heavy arms were handed over to the Tatmadaw on 12 January 1996, and on 14 January, 9,749 MTA soldiers surrendered with 6,004 heavy and small weapons, 197 HoMong-made launchers, 13,452 (or 24,452) grenades, 10,346 (or 18,346) mines and 7,407 (or 17,027) heavy arms rounds. 9,749 MTA soldiers surrendered, or maybe ‘over’ 4000 surrendered, in return for 50,000 sacks of rice. KhunSa was given a commercial bus concession from Rangoon to Shan State, a casino at Myawaddy (near the old Karen National Union headquarters at Mannerplaw, which has become a notorious ‘ya-ba’ transit point) and more; the junta steadfastly refuses a US offer of $2 million for his extradition. The USWA took over many of the border strongholds: “They have real capabilities and a growing infrastructure,” Shan Herald Agency for News (S.H.A.N.) quoted a diplomat. “This has the appearance of an emerging state.” In Mong Yawn valley north of ChiangMai’s Mae Ai district, the Wa have built roads, dams, an electricity-generating plant, underground fuel tanks, military compounds, schools, a hospital and modern town, employing 6,000 Thai laborers - with the only money they have, drug money.
A settlement built in 2000 by southern Wa boss Wei HseuhKang (Wei Xuegang, first part of KMT intellignence, then with Khun Sa until 1995 when he joined the small Wa National Council, later merged with the United Wa State Army), about 6 km from the border opposite Chiang Rai Province, reportedly has shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles (ones Khun Sa got from Cambodia and mujahadeen?). Plans to enlarge Mong Yawn - population around 10,000 early in 2004 - to about 120,000, involve a shifting Wa southward: part of a mysterious plan for ending opium cultivation by forced depopulation instead of crop substitution. Perhaps it’s really about allowing (un-assimilatable) Wa from Yunnan to move into evacuated old Wa areas. Settlers on both sides of the Thai border are planting hundreds of thousands of fruit trees, as well as beans, corn and coffee, but Mong Yawn can’t support even another 50,000 people through just agriculture and livestock breeding.
“The Burmese are playing with fire,” S.H.A.N. quotes a Western analyst. “By diversifying their forces and territory, the Wa are gaining strength and influence.” Many Wa leaders are actually ethnic Chinese; north of the Wa “states” is Kokang state (all these are parts of Shan State), where most people are ethnic Chinese. The enmity between the Burmese government and Wa has resulted in a mini-arms race, and it’s doubtful the ethnic minorities will ever feel, or be, secure without having their own military capability. The UWSA has become one of the world’s largest drug-trafficking organizations, well able to procure powerful munitions. The US Justice Department indicted eight senior Wa officials in January 2005 (in absentia), on narcotics charges, but is really little threat to them. By forcing impoverished people to migrate, the UWSA has greatly increased its influence in Shan State, particularly in areas new to it where the Shan State Army (S.S.A., successor to the MTA) also operates – mostly along the Thai border.
Complicating the picture are new roads and infrastructure arrangements to make a “growth quadrangle” expanding the “Golden Triangle” of Burma, Thailand and Laos, to include Yunnan, China. This big area has many people with common ethnic backgrounds: Shans, Dai/Zhouang, Laotians, Lawa and Yi/Lolo hill-tribes. The proposals mean to boost tourism, encourage economic imperialism, and facilitate repressive political control. “The formation of the Golden Rectangle is inevitable because of the geo-economic advance of China toward the south,” Thai political scientist Sukhumbhand Paribatra told the Bangkok Post. “One has to be very careful, because this advance will be linked to the region’s powerful local Chinese communities.” Kunming officials have expressed hope that Bangladesh and China will work together: “Yunnan is China’s southwest province... and we want to develop a framework to enhance economic cooperation between China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India,” Shi Minghui, deputy director general of the Foreign Affairs Office of Yunnan, was quoted as saying. China’s relations with Bangladesh bear major politico-economic implications; China has begun using the Bay of Bengal for military purposes, and wants to access it overland to increase commerce from land-locked Yunnan. Meanwhile, overcrowded Bangladesh poses a refugee problem - regular flooding dislocates its citizens, but more refugees come in - particularly Rohingya, Islamic people from Myanmar’s Arakan State - than leave. That that could change surely concerns Indian authorities.
Myanmar’s SPDC (a newer acronym for what once was SLORC) has initiated more “War on Drugs,” banning opium. Over a quarter of Kokang’s population left; rigid enforcement keeps half the remaining poor, with food security only six months a year. Some must work fields nearly naked, and try eating tree bark, as in North Korea. Throughout Shan State, 350,000 households, about two million people, are losing their primary source of earnings, indeed, 70 percent of cash income, because opium is now prohibited. People are withdrawing children from school and passing up health services, selling off livestock, land and daughters. “The reversed sequencing of first forcing farmers out of poppy cultivation before ensuring other income opportunities is a grave mistake,” warned Martin Jelsma of the Trans¬national Institute (TNI, an international network of activist-scholars based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands). “Aggressive drug control efforts against farmers and small-scale opium traders, and forced eradication opera¬tions in particular, will have a negative impact on prospects for peace and democracy in both countries.” Alternative livelihood programs should have been in place before eradication, as reductions in income will result in malnutrition and poor health. But about a hundred drug refineries remain, and a fully successful ban seems unlikely. Raids on refineries carried out in a “War on Drugs” target only smaller players. Control of all aspects of the huge business is now in the hands of a few major players, most prominent among them, the USWA.
Most refineries have been relocated to ‘safer’ UWSA areas. One being run by a local Lahu militia in western Mongton was raided on March 30, 2003 - a clear example of a small player being ousted out. The refinery set up by Kya Nu, leader of a militia group numbering only about 30-40 men was in Mongjawd. After the raid, Kya Nu was arrested and jailed; his militia was disbanded and the raid publicized by the SPDC as an example of UWSA cooperation in drug eradication efforts. The reality is that the UWSA has simply monopolized the drug trade in Mongjawd – it’s since set up new refineries in the same area. The SPDC junta and its military remain involved in all aspects of the drug trade, and condones such involvement as a means of subsidizing army costs at field level.
Roads now link Mae Sai with Jinghong, Yunnan, and thus Kunming, through Sipsongpanna (the “twelve kingdoms” or 12,000 rice fields legendary birthplace of the T’ai race). Soon there should be easy passage through Laos, and someday maybe even northern Burma; so far most roads in Northern Burma and Laos are barely passable for 4-wheel drive vehicles, but serious commercialization of the region appears imminent.
Burma’s northernmost state, Kachin, bordering Tibet in the foothills of the Himalayas, is one of the world’s most mineral-rich areas, with gold and high-quality jade. Opium production was substandard, and is no longer attempted. Kachin State remains poor and sparsely populated, with some rugged sub-Himalayan areas labeled ‘uninhabited.’ Still, teak and other hardwoods flow from those mountainous areas through Thailand to Japan, alarming rainforest preservationists. Thai prime-minister Taksin Shinawatra (pronounced Sin-awat or Chin-awat) spoke of developing ski resorts there, with flights from Chiang Mai.
Along the north-south Thai-Burma border, some Karen and Mon remain insurgent, with just a bit of international media attention and a little outside aid, but the possibility of their cultural survival seems as much in question as that of the Shan and small hill-tribes. An extremely controversial natural-gas pipeline (Yadana, Kanchanaburi, Unocal) was put in to supply a questionable Thai electricity-generating factory, disrupting much; Baptist and other fundamental Christian Church organizations, non-governmental relief organizations and global mega-corp business interests (Big Pharma, carbonated beverages, electronics) also have on-going, questionable, impact. Perhaps in all as disruptively exploitative are the many international tourists who go to “undeveloped” hill-tribe villages to photograph “long-necked women” (from the small Padaung tribe, perhaps one born under a full moon, whatever, one with many brass rings covering the neck and depressing the collar-bone). Such tourism seldom benefits the ethnic people, especially financially. What little they might gain they are certain to soon lose. Exploitation and manipulation by the rich and influential in the area involves little governmental interference. Now many long-neck villages (human zoos) are reachable by car, and advertised.
For over 20 years refineries in Shan State produced half the world’s supply of heroin, the area’s primary hard currency earner. It traveled through China and/or Thailand, as documented by Alfred McCoy in “The Politics of Heroin” (1972, Harper & Row), often in the care of ChiuChau (TehChiu) dialect speakers whose ancestors came from Swatow, the port of Kwantung in SE China. The TehChiu, a dominant part of Thai politics, are scattered around the world and suspected of extensive ‘Triad’ (secret society) involvement. Ethnic Yunnanese Muslim Panthays, called by the Thai “Haw”, are also blamed (but poorly identified, except as expatriate Yunnanese), and one runs across mention of new “triads” like 14K, competing strongly with the legendary Chinese secret societies.
However supplied, illegal heroin remains available virtually worldwide, flowing not only from the Golden Triangle, but equally from Afghanistan (and especially the Pakistani border area). It also comes from Laos, Lebanon, Columbia, Mexico, Sudan, and recently, southern ex-Soviet states (“-istans”). It’s questionable why American law enforcement thought capture of KhunSa might have any impact on narcotic availability or price, and why crop substitution or eradication is even necessary, as there is important medical utility, and legal narcotic production in India, Iran, Turkey, and Tasmania, Australia. Poppy seeds are used as food, on buns and bagels. In Burma they’re widely used for one of the country’s delicacies, Bein Mon (pancake made of rice flour, palm sugar, coconut chips and peanuts, garnished with poppy seeds), and are traded openly. With use of a bit of intelligent imagination, alternative income sources could be found: ganja/cannabis seeds also have great value, and are easily transported, but are irrationally suppressed. Drugs burned in public displays are suspected of adulteration by addition of food poppy, gum, sap and pods emptied of seeds; no-one can investigate thoroughly. Lashio officials were quoted as saying that as soon as foreign guests and reporters left, national security officials doused the fire and retrieved residue for the next round of bonfires - it’s all a farce, all about control.
In the 1970s, Burma produced 250 to 400 tons of opium per year. 350 tons in 1985 rose to 1,280 tons in 1988; in ‘89, it was 2,000 tons, maybe more. For the ‘90s, US State Department figures show between 2,000 and 2,500 tons a year, and for year 2000 were about 1,200. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) put Burma’s 2003-2004 output at 370 tons, down from 2002’s 800 plus, due to bad weather. In peak year 1993, Laos produced 210 tons of opium. In response to Rangoon officials’ claim that opium output had dropped in 2001 to 865 tons from 1,065 tons in 2000, noted Shan scholar Dr. Chao Tzang Yawnghwe commented that official figures were “arbitrary.” Opium production in Burma may not have been as much as many ‘experts’ have stated – quotes may often have been double or more of actual production. In the ’70s, production may have averaged as little as 200 metric tons per year, and only 250 in the ’80s; it is hard to be authoritatively accurate about that. But by 1997, production began to decrease. By 2007, Laos produced only 10 metric tons, and production in Myanmar was down to about 20% of peak. Meanwhile, Afghani production, already high (well over 2000 metric tons) trebled, and extensive production began in Latin America. And, as production decreased in Shan State, it increased (although hardly correspondingly) in Kachin State – as also has use. And where opium farming ceased, the poverty of hundreds of thousands of ex-opium farming families increased.
Population, and especially AIDS, statistics vary a lot, and government, like bureaucracy, is more self-protecting than altruistic. S.H.A.N. reports Dai officials in Yunnan’s Dehong Autonomous Prefecture, opposite northern Shan State, questioning the annual output figures given by the UN and US, which have been shrinking each year. “What we are seeing here in Mongmao (Ruili) is a rise not only in trafficking but also addictions,” it quotes a drug enforcement source who posits more than 3,000 users in Ruili’s Zegang neighborhood alone, at least 10% of them female. “If there is really a drop in the production then the logical question is from where are we getting all the dope?” Chinese authorities are also displeased by Myanmar’s failure to hand over 24 of 34 drug fugitives who took refuge there.
Specialists from the USA have provided satellite and other intelligence about opium convoys, yet narcotics seizures have never reached 1%. During the period of most intensive US aid, ’85-‘88 - opium fields were sprayed with 2.4-D herbicide, from planes given by the USA - but estimated opium yield doubled. US aid was typically ineffective in achieving what it was purportedly intended to do. KhunSa’s surrender didn’t lower heroin production, but the SPDC claimed it incinerated 625 kilos of opium, 759 kilos of heroin and 3 million methamphetamine pills, 2000 kilos (over 2 tons) of drugs, on June 26, 2005: Yangon’s 19th propagandistic destruction of narcotics (in one they bulldozed bottles of ‘Krakindaeng’ Thai energy drink).
“The junta’s token attempts at crop substitution, often with international assistance, have also failed miserably, due to poor planning, coercive implementation and complete disregard for the welfare of local populations. Under the so-called “New Destiny” project launched in April 2002, farmers in many townships have been forced to plant a new strain of rice from China, which has failed in each locality,” according to S.H.A.N. Opium takes only three months and is a cash crop. Nothing else yet compares, as “ya-ba” doesn’t require farmers. Constant terror, atrocities and warfare make opium cultivation still the only choice for many.
Early last century, Shan were selling opium to the Yunnanese, who transported it down the Yangtze and sold it to the French. The Shan were then divided into 34 small principalities, but had no concept of rigid border demarcation. Warlords demanded to receive ‘taxation’ on all that passed by (as KhunSa said is all he did), and thus discouraged much farming of food for market. Trade was ruined to the point where salt became expensive and goiter a widespread problem. Without the drug business, the consumer economy of Burma might grind to a halt, as much of the little for sale is funded through it. Shan people wish to enter the modern world with the respect and the dignity merited by capable and industrious people, which they are, but commerce in narcotics hasn’t helped much, except insofar as it kept at bay, for awhile, Burmese military madness. The Myanmar government has, unintentionally or not, limited big business concerns that eventually may present an even more disruptive danger to Burma’s various peoples and cultures. Modern infrastructure can be doubly dangerous in this area, tending as it does to bring governmental repression and corporate exploitation. A direct relationship clearly exists between poverty and the narcotics problem, but KhunSa’s aide Khernsai Jaiyen expressed no interest in the parallels with problems in South America, or in contacts there, when I asked. Shan State may never be able to have more impact on the world beyond it than it had through narcotics, and it’s unclear how much outside people should feel obliged to become involved in internal Shan State affairs. But with drug addiction a problem of increasing magnitude, especially due to AIDS, it can easily seem to be a problem of either influencing the situation, or being influenced by it.
The emerging situation
The once-famous drug-lords dead and gone, most refineries in the eastern Shan area are now controlled by Wei HseuhKang (or Xuekang), an ethnic Chinese from Yunnan wanted by both Thai and US law enforcement. In 2003 he moved from Monghsat to a northern area of Tangyan, given to him in 2001 by then SPDC Secretary-1 KhinNyunt (a supposed master-spy elevated to Prime Minister then put under house arrest, who proposed turning HoMong into a tourist attraction - an idea sure to be revived). Wei’s refineries in MongTon and Monghsat are run by other Yunnan Chinese, Chao Ching and Li Hsen. With Pao Yuqiang, these people briefly had a thriving metropolis at Möng La, opposite Daluo in Yunnan.
Wei’s brothers Wei HsuehLong and Wei HsuehYing (also Yunnanese) fled to the Wa States when Communists took over China, and were connected to the KMT-CIA spy network along the Burma-China border until the 1970s. Wei HsuehKang served as KhunSa’s treasurer at Ban HinTaek (now Thoed Thai) just south of the Thai-Burmese border in ChiangRai. After 1989, the Wei brothers linked up with Wa president Bao Youxiang’s United Wa State Army (UWSA), but remained little known until a New York court indicted them, and other senior Wa leaders, on charges of smuggling heroin and amphetamine to the US. Xiao Minliang, Vice Chairman to Bao Youxiang, Ai Lone, Chief of Staff of the United Wa State Army, Zhao Wenxing, deputy Chief of Staff, Li Chengwu, a Kokang-Chinese hard-liner against Yangon serving as Bao’s military adviser, Vice-chairman Bo Lakham, who knows little Burmese but headed the Wa delegation to two sessions of the National Convention, are reported by S.H.A.N. as top cadre. These people are worrisome to both Yangon and Beijing, as they speak of themselves as a government. Wa’s don’t want to be Chinese anymore than they want to be Burmese, or under either’s authority. Important Chinese business communities in Mandalay and Yangon are growing rapidly; both Than Shwe and USWA are dependent on Chinese arms, and neither can stay isolated and intransigent much longer. At any rate, by 1993, the UWSA had moved heavily into the less complex methamphetamines production, less complex and more profitable.
In rural Shan State, people use “ya-ba” openly, to stay up to help at a ceremony or temple festival, or for extra “energy” in the fields; there’s little social stigma for those who use it, much as, traditionally, with opium. In the past few years, it’s become common for polite hosts in Shan State to offer meth to visitors, with the traditional tea. This isn’t weird: varieties of drugs are accepted everywhere, and natural kinds are used pleasantly and successfully, within appropriate social context. Amphetamines are dangerous, but are known to have been used in moderation (doctors in the USA prescribed them freely when I was young, and many people took no more than their doctor recommended).
Nasu Lahu-na (my wife) remembers when most people along the border were engaged in the drug trade: there were many rivalries, there was much pride, gossip and back-stabbing. She says people would burn with urges for revenge, and report rivals to police… Once somebody caught their favorite enemy out alone on a jungle path, cut his head off and hung it up. Nasu’s father forbade her to go out there, but she couldn’t resist, and snuck a look. There was easy money to be made, but it wasn’t, isn’t, a good trade. The Thai Ministry of Health estimated 2,650,000 meth addicts in 2001 (4.3% of population total and 91% of the total addict population); mornings going to work I’d see herds of thin post-adolescents with brightly colored hair loitering in filling-station lots, after discos closed at 7 a.m. Even today, entertainment places for Thai youth close well after tourist-oriented ones, no explanation offered.
Around Kengtung, farm hands sometimes now get paid in meth pills instead of money. In 1994, a group of Thai dealers approached Khun Sa, but he spoke against meth: ‘Heroin is okay’, he reasoned, ‘our main customers are across the ocean. But, with ya-ba, we only have Thais for customers. If we start producing it, we’ll come face to face with Thailand. That’ll make our position more difficult.’ His uncle Khun Hseng (Chang Ping-yuan) was won over, though, and soon yaba produced in HoMong was of top quality. Drug producers in Shan State tried expanding into Extasy, but their chemists haven’t made a popular product (maybe good chemists don’t want to live in back woods). Wa and Kokang leaders could abandon heroin by establishing meth labs, and then not need to worry about weather. Labs can be moved, and food farming gives a stabler economic base. Opium is making a temporary disappearing act (locally), but other drugs substitute (‘date rape’ drugs have certainly made a name for themselves). The ya-ba market was lucrative until Taksin’s Drug Wars, but customers remain in the Bangkok area, and India, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Korea.
Amphetamines go to many of Myanmar’s armaments suppliers and other enablers. The Thai “War on Drugs” which started in 2003 with the murder - in just a couple of months - of thousands of possible small-timers (with minimal subsequent investigation, at best), made Shan State traffickers avoid the northern Thai border, and sell only to long-term, well-trusted Thai contacts. Thai newspapers still regularly report busts, but trafficking drugs into China has become preferable to down through Lashio and Mandalay to Moulmein, Kanchanaburi and Bangkok (though that still happens too). Beijing replaced paramilitary police with five regular army regiments, to patrol the northern Shan-China border; corruption among border officials was contributing to the problem, especially at Zegao and Ruili, opposite Muse (on the ‘Burma Road’). Many fewer Chinese officials currently enjoy the high-life in the gambling town of MongLa (on the border), than did just a few years ago. Taksin’s ‘War on Drugs’ forced drug operators to reroute their products, but a Chinese attitude that it’s better to die than be poor, means many replacement traffickers will be available. The 25 March, 2005 Bangkok Post reported 1.14 million addicts in China, equally divided between heroin and methamphetamine (quoting Yang Fengrui, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security, as saying, “the situation has begun to deteriorate.”). The Wa have become a Chinese ally, and much of Shan State is becoming Wa State.
One report claims that as many as 300,000 Wa were relocated, to areas just north of the Thai/Myanmar border, to cut off support for the SSA-South. Many who’d recently come from Yunnan were replaced by Han Chinese. Certainly, many Shans and Lahu were evicted to make space for arriving Wa, and as a result suffer increased poverty. The Wa region along the Chinese border has passed several deadlines to become drug-free; but what are viable alternatives to drug production? What can be done towards sustainable community-based development and strengthening civil society to enable farmers to participate in decision-making processes about their future?
An Akha displaced from just south of Mong Hsat by Wa newcomers asserted that Chinese were easily distinguishable from Wa: “There were some Chinese with them (the Wa settlers). They set up shops and sold various food items. They also made whiskey to sell from corn. I also saw some Chinese soldiers and officers with the Wa Army. They wore Wa uniforms, but they were whiter-skinned than the Wa, so it was easy to tell them apart. They spoke no language other than Chinese.” A report from the Mong Karn, east of Mong Hsat, mentions that among 300 new Wa households moving into Mong Karn village, were 30 Chinese households. New Chinese are particularly concentrated at Ban Hoong, south of Mong Hsat. There, about 1000 Chinese are helping conduct Wei Hsiao Kang’s military and economic affairs.
The Wa area on the Chinese border is now pressured to become drug-free, but how are poor ex-cultivators to replace their lost income? What crop substitution projects and possibilities are there? Will there be reliable markets for the substitute crops? What can be done towards sustainable community-based development and strengthening civil society to enable farmers to participate in decision-making processes about their future?
Rubber, tea and oranges are now grown extensively in the area, and gem and zinc mining are expanding, as is cigarette production. Expanded road infrastructure and consequent growth in trucking has led to Chinese marrying love-for-hire, and more cultivation of corn, sesame, soybeans, peanuts, fruit and cabbages. Success in alternatives depends largely on China. Thailand doesn’t impose tariffs on import of fruits grown under the UWSA control, to help the Wa renounce so much that is counter-productive in their way of life, but farmers remain with little voice in decision-making processes affecting their livelihoods. Both opium prices and wages rose at least 50% between 2003 and 2005; seasoned observers expect little else to change, but even right on the border, in April 2006, both opium and amphetamines are hard to find.
The Shan Human Rights Foundation estimated Shan refugees denied refugee status, but arrived in Thailand from 1996 to 2002, at over 230,000. Sunai Phasuk, a Thai academic and consultant for Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, “These people are not just fleeing war, but also forced labor, executions, mass relocations and systematic rape;” and Thailand is “violating international law” for denying basic humanitarian assistance to the Shan. An HRW report documents the murder, rape, enslavement and brutal displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Tatmadaw’s long-running assault on Karen insurgents: 650,000 made homeless in eastern Burma alone. It’s pointless to discuss who suffers more, Karen or Shan; Mon I met in Rangoon, and Burmese in Pagan, also told stories of murder and mayhem by “governmental authorities.”
The UN World Food Program has supplied rice and cereal grains to Wa and Kokang ex-poppy farmers, particularly in Kokang, Panghsang and Lashio and to some of the other many needy in the potentially wealthy country. A million ‘Internally Displaced Persons’, 42% in eastern areas, are on the run from “scorched earth” policies that Human Rights Watch calls ethnic cleansing… 140,000+ are in refugee camps along the western Thai border, many for over 20 years now. Political reform and better economic management are more needed than charity; Burma lacks intelligent logistics, not rice.
Yangon isn’t the capital anymore, and neither is there really a junta now. Than Shwe has become “father of the country”, and wants control of the Chinese border, for which purpose divisions among the frequently-feuding Wa would come in handy. China’s stake in the relocation program is unclear, but it has provided much towards the huge costs of Wa relocations to the southern border of Shan State. Chinese authorities may want tribal people who show no propensity towards assimilation as Chinese to relocate from Yunnan to a place where they may serve some political purpose. Wa leaders want to use their areas in the north for resettling Wa villagers from China… but the world, it seems, is more interested in profits and oil.
Meanwhile, displaced populations bring to the generally porous border a huge increase in dangerous disease: pneumonia, dysentery, hepatitis, malaria, dengue, smallpox, TB, typhoid, typhus, cholera, yaws, polio, yellow fever, blackwater fever, influenza, scabies, meningitis, leprosy and even humans infected with anthrax! One with anthrax was a Chinese “Wa” leader - hospitalized in Tachilek. Despite Thai law, tea pickers and other laborers daily cross the border, and traders and even big businessmen do regular, though often officially unsanctioned, cross-border commerce. The environment is being ruined, individuals lose integrity through involvement in drugs, others lose all sense of propriety through systematic rape (certainly not helpful for containing HIV), cultures crumble - all for the sake of egotism among the small-minded wealthy and powerful. Ideals may seem anachronistic, and political involvement suspect; one becomes tempted to turn ones back to quietly just tend ones own garden, but meanwhile immune deficiency offers germs and viruses chance to rapidly develop new forms... The most popular of Taksin’s populist policies, his 30 baht health scheme, has resulted in long hospital queues for pain-killers and antibiotics. The rampant, almost indiscriminant usage of antibiotics exacerbates the potential plague menace, and not just because doctors haven’t time to seriously investigate complaints or suggest behavior modifications: germs not only gain immunity to poisons, but both pain-killers and antibiotics weaken immune systems.
If not Lo, or Khun Sa, or Wei, then surely someone else; so why does the DEA offer a tip-off reward, especially knowing it not enough to compensate for the danger elicited by providing it? Fear may or may not keep the starving from crime, but a whole society cannot be intimidated. Someone will come forward to assert self-respect, and regardless of how it provokes those seen as oppressors. People will always seek some chemical comfort from intoxicants, be it nicotine, alcohol, caffeine or something illegal. Should public welfare gain precedence over profits for dictators and global mega-corporations, the Shan, Wa and others could grow useful and beneficial hemp of non-intoxicating varieties; this might well help things in general. Instead of us allowing China to dominate world trade, a resurgence of valuable products could be quickly fostered. Surely China would get in on the act too, but innovations could more easily occur elsewhere first. The benefits from lowering dependence on drugs alone should be enough for governments to get behind this idea, if public welfare is indeed of concern to them, and not just power of a most temporary kind.
Burma has never known good governance, and drug trade and genocide in Shan State won’t stop without it. The government of China doesn’t care about genocide or cultural extinction(s); it’s become focused (like the West) on exploitation and profit. Many Chinese, though, recognize massive errors in their governance. Of Southeast Asian countries, the best-governed is semi-feudal Malaysia, where ethnic Malays get two votes while ethnic Chinese citizens only one. Modern, autocratic Singapore doesn’t mind if neighbors to the north receive drug flow; newly autocratic USA has lost moral legitimacy through inequitable “free trade” pacts, gross over-consumption, pollution, refusal to deal with global warming, and, of course, gross failure in regard to ‘terrorism’ and Iraq (illegal, inept invasion after mass-murder of innocents first through supplying Saddam Hussein then through ill-conceived sanctions). Mainland countries east of India and south of China can hardly pretend to honest, transparent governance, and are coming increasingly under the sway of Chinese… North America will fall further and faster if it doesn’t clean up its act by taking real interest in justice, human rights, environmental preservation, good governance and corporate restraint, instead of media manipulation, crowd-control weaponry, and ‘regime change’ - which should be the business only of the UN and local populations. Is there even an ‘international community’ to respond to genocide anymore? Why are there so few people like Guy Horton, documenting problems and making varieties of important information (such as the boom in “crowd control” weaponry) readily accessible, in organized fashion, through the news media or on the Net?
Nowadays druggies and some of the young set like to go to Laos to stay with poor people and try drugs, but anyone with even a shred of pretension to integrity will notice the negative effect doing that has on local communities visited. Unconstructive over-indulgence gets a stamp of approval from people of enviable position; greed and avarice are rewarded while dignity mislaid. Dope, while natural remains fairly innocent, but commercialized becomes a tool of exploitative greed, used against the already oppressed. Mess with it, and sooner or later, and more likely sooner, you will be, and feel, betrayed. One doesn’t really get to choose to join a mafia, or other secret organization; one must already be in place, before one even knows it… It’s not only other people who often aren’t what they seem, but sometimes also even you own self can suddenly seem quite different, changed or revealed… Remember, you can’t buy respect, or trust, or love.
In 1994 a U.S. grand jury indicted a member of Thailand's parliament as a major marijuana supplier, alleging he smuggled 40 to 49 tons of potent marijuana (“Thai stick”) to the U.S. West Coast, using container ships to carry it from Thailand. The indictment charged parliament member Thanong Siripreechapong (alias Por Ped – Little Duck - Yodmuangcharoen, a.k.a. ''Thai Tony'' to certain US government agents, particularly ion Customs and the DEA) with heading a sophisticated 14-year-long pot-smuggling operation (1973 to 1987); some say the DEA was more concerned with his involvement in heroin. Thanong was accused in a sealed federal indictment handed down in 1991; the U.S. government seized Thanong's Beverly Hills home and a Mercedes-Benz on the grounds that they were purchased with the illegal profits of his narcotics business. But Thanong, a former Chart Thai MP from Nakhon Phanom, pled not guilty. Judge Vaughn Walker sentenced him to time served (nearly four years of pre-trial detention) then sent him home to Thailand the same day. Apparently the accusations involved fabrication by the informer, false statements by the case agent, and the commission of crimes by both, during the course of the investigation and prosecution. It appears that significant information provided to the grand jury was false, and most likely deliberately fabricated.
Be that as it may, Thai stick, which had become popular in Europe and Australia and the US East Coast as well as in California and elsewhere, disappeared. A rumor was spread that Thanong had been a gofer for a US Army supply sergeant when a young lad, and that the pot came from Isaan, but I’ve no way to validate or repudiate any of that. Nor do I know how popular, or widespread, marijuana use has ever been in Thailand – seems to me it’s use has been mostly with the backer set, in Pai, MaeHongSon, and at islands where full-moon raves are held. It doesn’t seem popular with locals, although I understand that the seed was a traditional ingredient in a popular kind of kwiteao noodle soup. At the ChiangMai Night Bazaar, hemp products have long been available, but mostly they’re from China, I’m pretty sure.
Soon after Thanon’s release, ChiangRai seemed to be awash in cash and partying for a week. Suddenly Big C was selling something called “Little Duck Munchies”, which soon completely disappeared. Poh Pet certainly could have gotten elected back to parliament from ChiangRai, but pleaded poor health. Also, on December 15, 2003, just after a meeting with close aides of Chonburi’s infamous Somchai Khunpluem (Kamnan Poh), Thanong was allegedly being beaten up, and then fetched a pistol from his car and shot one of the aides, Wallop Supapornpasuphat, four times.
Another member of parliament, M.P. Mongkol Suthanamanee from Chiang Rai, was refused a U.S. visa because he is believed to be part of the drug network headed by fellow northern M.P. Narong Wongwan. Narong, named Prime Minister designate of Thailand in March, 1992, lost the nomination when it was publicly revealed that the U.S. refused him a visa because of his involvement in the drug trading. This also happened to Vatana Asavahame, deputy leader of Chart Thai Party. But, as with Narong, Thanong and Mongkok before him, the Thai authorities see no reason to even investigate Vatana further. Vatana Puea Pandin party chairman in 2008, is believed to be in hiding in Cambodia
The rivalry between elements of the Thai police and military involved in the drug trade, at least in the 50s, and involvement by Laotian government officials into the 1970s have been dealt with elsewhere (particularly in Alfred McCoy’s excellent and admirable work, “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia”). Involvement by officials in Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Columbia, Panama, Mexico and elsewhere have also been convincingly documented - leaving quite open an interesting question of the extent of nefarious influences resultant from the suppression of natural substances long an important part of all cultures everywhere. That depression is disease (as in dis-ease) is unquestionable; that headaches from difficult situations are but chemical imbalances to be addressed only by the medical profession with the help of BigPharma mega-corps definitely questionable. Hemp, narcotics and stimulants have their value, and although some control of them is necessary, it’s been taken too far, and perhaps for less than questionable reasons. True concern for justice and public welfare must oppose the current legal format for addressing the issue of drugs.
Into the 70's, in rural Thailand, many households had a small ganja field; bai kratom (Mitragyna speciosa, probably an alkaloid), pretty poppies and opium were common, and older people still used betel… Then big money took over the world, promoting ‘heroin chic’, expensive alcohol, corporate control… When Taksin started his first drug war, a billion methamphetamine pills were sold annually in Thailand; over 3 million people took them (perhaps only 300,000 were drug dependent). But the drugs war is also a race war. Border minorities were targeted for brutal police action; there was torture, and the number of dead vastly exceeded the body counts quoted. Thailand's poorest suffered, also people threatening to the powerful: over 400,000 people 'surrendered' themselves for treatment, some of whom surely had little or no involvement, but ended up on corporate-management style target lists police still can’t ignore. With marketing and market expansion dominant forces of control, stimulants have utility, and can still be purchased - expensively - in the country’s urban center; meanwhile arts and entertainment are losing out to golf and fine dining. Self-congratulation’s far more satisfying than facing truth, values that generated society, as well as society’s future, become seen as irrelevant.
A task force of salaried scientists and engineers, in politicos dreams, will surely overcome all problems! Some believe development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be necessary for a world at peace. I don’t.
Cultural survival for tribal groups in Burma and Laos remains problematic, with few signs of hope on the horizon. The importance of cultural diversity, like the importance of ecological diversity, seems lost on far too many, but remains nevertheless real. Much as those who fail to learn from history will repeat mistakes, those who refuse to learn from the experience of others will also.
Geography and Opium : Geopium
The fascination exerted in the West by opium – a substance that is at once a remedy and a poison – has been enhanced by the aura of mystery that has long surrounded it, an aura at least partially fuelled by the Far Eastern origins and uses that were frequently, and erroneously, attributed to the drug. The opium poppy continues to express this strange duality: on the one hand, it relieves pain and suffering, but, on the other, it is capable of plunging long-term users into the hopelessness of severe addiction.
However, while the routine smoking of opium is certainly, although indirectly, a Chinese practice, the geographic origin of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum L., is by no means Far Eastern. Indeed, it is thought that the plant first appeared somewhere between the Mediterranean region and Asia Minor. The continuing mystery concerning the poppy’s exact origins is equalled only by the opacity which characterises the two largest opium-producing regions in the world today – the Golden Triangle, in Mainland South-East Asia, and the Golden Crescent, in Southwest Asia.
Far in a way the largest proportion of the world’s illicit opium is produced in the closely-packed mountain ranges spanning the 7,500 km from Turkey to Vietnam and passing, of course, through Afghanistan. But it is in the western and eastern parts of this mountainous band, on either side of India, that are to be found the world’s two most important illicit opium-producing regions in the present day, respectively the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle. Certainly, it has not always been this way, and the kind of disruptions characteristic of opium cultivation and trafficking which have marked the history of Asia since the beginning of the 19th century are now more relevant than ever.
The two regions known as the “Golden Triangle” and the “Golden Crescent” include numerous territories whose differences and similarities are transcended by a major shared phenomenon: the illicit cultivation of the opium poppy and the transformation of opium into heroin. Many of the other characteristics of the territories in question lend themselves to the establishment of certain rapprochements and comparisons.
For example, both the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent are located high lands and both have been, and indeed still are, difficult to reach. They can thus be termed marginal due to their geographical position, while the mountainous areas of which they are constituted can be classified as peripheral to the basins and valleys hosting regional government centres.
But the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent also share the characteristic of being multiethnic areas which overlap national borders. As a matter of fact, in the two regions, the areas dedicated to the production of the opium poppy both straddle the borders of the three countries that contain them; historically and strictly speaking, the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent are superimposed on the contiguous borders of Burma, Laos and Thailand on the one hand, and Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan on the other.
Legitimate questions can be asked as to the nature of the factors that have allowed, or even encouraged, the development of such high levels of opiate production in Asia. Which factors in particular have anchored and perpetuated an opium economy, specifically in the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent? And, in view of the fact that a number of countries have a high potential for the cultivation of opium and have, like China, amply demonstrated it, what explanation can be put forward to account for the fact that the phenomenon has not extended beyond the regions adjoining the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent?
More than the question of the resort to a particular economic activity, here the central issue is that of the localisation and spatialisation of illicit opium production.
Also of great interest are the study and analysis of the complexity and diversity shown by the drug trafficking routes from and within the Golden Triangle and the Goden Crescent. The spread of the HIV and Aids along drug trafficking routes, especially in Central Asia and in China, is one of the most important topics in the field of drug studies as far as health issues are concerned.
In the end, it is a geopolitical reading of the genesis of the opium territories that is offered here.
An excerpt from Les territoires de l'opium, by Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy (Olizane, Geneva, 2002), translated by Michael Lavin.
Phuc nguyen
Reference
[1] http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars/opiumwars1.html
[2] http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/govpubs/amhab/amhabc3.htm
[3] http://shanland.mongloi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3485:drugs-and-cultural-survival-in-the-golden-triangle-&catid=115:opinions&Itemid=308
[4] http://www.geopium.org/
